Bay Nature October-December 2016 by Bay Nature Institute

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A N E X P L O R AT I O N O F N AT U R E I N T H E S A N F R A N C I S CO B AY A R E A

Return of the River Otters

Burning Questions about Eucalyptus

A Fishing Expedition Tracking California Condors

contents

october–december 2016

Features 26

A fishing expedition Searching for Anglers in the East Bay Parks Bay Area chef and writer De Tran went out looking for Vietnamese-American anglers on piers and shorelines in several East Bay parks and found instead a loose community of people who love to fish and a trove of memories from his childhood in Vietnam. by De Tran

Maggie Chiang

Phoo Chan

Jaymi Heimbuch

welcome back otters River Otters Swim and Slide Their Way Back to the Bay Area Officially, river otters were no longer to be found in the Bay Area. But then they started appearing here and there and everywhere, so a dedicated group of advocates started tracking their progress, hoping to learn how to keep them here for good this time. by Kat McGowan

f l a m m ab l e c o m pa r e d to w h at ? Bur ning Questions About Eucalyptus On the 25th anniversary of the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, we try to take a dispassionate look at the science behind the flammability of eucalyptus trees—one of the factors deemed responsible for the severity of the fire. Turns out, it’s not so easy to do. by Zach St. George

Departments 4

Bay View

Opening Shot

Letter from the publisher The ghost humminbird of Santa Cruz by Sally Rae Kimmel 7

Currents

• The legacy of old pilings • November ballot measures • “Pipers” on the big screen • Beers inspired by local nature • Art confronts toxics in the Bay • Signs of the Season: A Taste of Bay Laurel

Conservation in Action It takes a village of volunteers to track the recovering population of California condors at Pinnacles National Park by Alison Hawkes

On the Trail

Former Salt Ponds Welcome Hikers, Bikers, Birders, and Boaters The restored salt ponds at Eden Landing in Hayward are welcoming back shorebirds, harbor seals, and people looking for peaceful naturebased recreation on the land and in the water. by Robin Meadows

14 Eden Landing

19 Elsewhere

Happy Centennial, National Park Service! Marin Headlands, Pinnacles National Park, Phleger Estate

First Person

Elizabeth Hadly Turns to the Future A conversation with a Stanford paleoecolgist about the multiple challenges of climate change. by Mary Ellen Hannibal

53 Ask the Naturalist

Bats and white-nose syndrome by Michael Ellis

54 Naturalist’s Notebook

Look! It’s a humpback! by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.Baynature.org PHOTO BY JACK THOMPSON

bayview letter from the publisher was about 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 20, 1991, and I had joined a small crowd standing on a street corner in south Berkeley, looking up the hill at orange flames and white-gray smoke billowing from the ridge to the east. It was the early stages of the Tunnel Fire, the devastating firestorm that claimed 25 lives and destroyed more than 3,000 homes in the Oakland hills before it was brought under control three days later. The fire had erupted around 11 a.m. from the embers of a grass fire that firefighters thought had been extinguished the night before. I was at home in north Berkeley that morning, already feeling vaguely restless due to the hot dry Diablo winds bringing super-heated air over the hills from the Central Valley. It was these winds that took a small grass fire and whipped it into the conflagration that eventually caused over $1.5 billion in damage. Unaware of the fire starting a few miles to the south, I thought I’d try to settle down by taking a peaceful walk in Tilden Regional Park. But it was even hotter and windier up in the hills and when my companion and I started smelling smoke, we knew we’d better head home. I still recall the uncomfortable prickly sensation on the back of my neck as we drove back down the hill, wondering where the fire was and where it was headed. I’d never experienced a wildfire so close to where I live. Of course, wildfire is a fact of life here in California, exacerbated this year by the prolonged drought. As I write, the

Elizabeth Hewson

contr ibuto rs Ali Budner (p. 11) is a writer and radio producer based in Oakland. She’s also a plant nerd and is trained as a western herbalist. Maggie Chiang (p. 32) is an award-winning illustrator and artist whose work has appeared in The New York Times. www.hellomaggiec.com Michael Ellis (p. 53) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-related tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com) and waxes eloquent for KQED’s

massive Soberanes Fire in Monterey County is still burning, only partially contained six weeks after it started. And to the north in Lake County, the smaller but more destructive Clayton Fire is finally under control, but only after devastating the town of Lower Lake and leaving several hundred people homeless. In general, the California landscape is meant to burn. As we’ve detailed in our coverage of the 1995 Vision Fire at Point Reyes and the Morgan Fire on Mount Diablo in 2013, wildfire can push a reset button on a natural landscape and renew the suite of native species that have evolved to coexist with fire. But human structures have not evolved with fire, so there’s a problem when blazes occur at the wildland-urban interface. And that problem is made worse when part of the “wildland” at that interface consists of plantations of eucalyptus trees. These Australian imports have several characteristics that make them especially dangerous in a fire, particularly their easily shed bark, which can help turn a small fire into an inferno, as happened in the Oakland hills. As we discuss in this issue, marking the 25th anniversary of the Tunnel Fire, the question of eucs and their flammability remains a highly charged one. I started out loving eucalyptus: When I first came to the Bay Area in the early 1970s, it was one of the few trees I could recognize, and I loved the smell. I didn’t realize that it’s a nonnative that has displaced native grasslands, woodlands, and coastal scrub, generally reducing biodiversity where it grows. Now I do. So count me as someone who’s just fine with taking out eucs to reduce fire danger. But not everyone agrees with me. Read our story in this issue on eucalyptus and fire and see what you think. And beware the Diablo winds of October. Perspectives series. Mary Ellen Hannibal (p. 38) is an award-winning environmental journalist and author of The Spine of the Continent (2012). Her new book, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction, was published in August 2016. Alison Hawkes (p. 12) is Bay Nature’s contributing editor. Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 54) is the author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds

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october–december 2016

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opening shot

news & notes from around the bay

albinism—the inability to produce melanin at all. The telltale difference between the two is the leucistic animal’s normally colored eyes and, in this case, beak and feet too. “It’s so striking,” says Todd Newberry, a birder and evolutionary biologist who volunteers at the arboretum. The adult bird’s repeated swooping dives suggest it’s likely male, but there’s little way to know where the bird came from or how long it will stay, although Anna’s are year-round residents in our region. Leucistic creatures are easy to spot and thus easy prey. Newberry is surprised the bird is still here, given a Cooper’s hawk nest with three chicks sits close to the hummer’s favorite plants. But for now, he says, “It’s a bird you go back to see again and again. It’s ghostly.”

Courtesy of California State Coastal Conservancy

An estimated 33,000 creosote-treated pilings stand—or, more often, partially stand— along the shore of the Bay, leaching toxins into the water that cause birth deformities in Pacific herring. The pilings are the derelict remnants of piers, wharves, warehouses, and more from as long ago as the 1800s. This fall, California’s State Coastal Conservancy (SCC) will remove the first batch of pilings from the San Pablo Bay shoreline just north of Point San Pablo in Richmond. The pilot project will remove 350 pilings and a collapsing creosote-treated deck adjacent to the old Red Rock warehouse, which was built in 1938. The site was chosen based on various criteria, among them the potential for successfully restoring eelgrass and other native habitats there, as well as providing structures for spawning Pacific herring. According to Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory studies, when herring lay their eggs on the creosote pilings, as opposed to another hard structure, the offspring die or are deformed from exposure to the hundreds of chemical compounds found in the petroleum byproduct. Pacific herring are important to the Bay ecosystem and local fisheries. Improving their habitat in the Bay is part of the San Francisco Bay Subtidal Habitat Goals, set by regional agencies in 2011 in an effort to restore the health of the Bay and its native species. Once the pilings and debris are removed, they’ll be dried and disposed of in landfills for non-hazardous waste. Restoration work at Point San Pablo will begin after the spawning season in the spring of 2017, and include experimenting with different structures and native plantings. “We’re learning about the best approach for subtidal restoration,” says Marilyn Latta, project manager with the SCC. “There’s a large team that’s worked on living shorelines, and we’re gaining firsthand knowledge by testing it out.” The $2 million pilot project, supported by a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, is the first of what the SCC and partners hope will be many such removal and restoration projects. Already in the planning stage is a site with 2,500 pilings at the Terminal 4 wharf in Richmond, not far from the Red Rock warehouse project.—by Victoria Schlesinger

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october–december 2016

p h ot o g r a p h by s a l ly r a e k i m m e l , f l i ck r . c o m / p h ot o s / s a l ly r a e k i m m e l

Creosote pilings (green) in San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun bays.

David Loeb

Starting to Remove 33,000 Creosote Pilings from the Bay

Ghost Bird On the morning of May 31, a rare Anna’s hummingbird turned up at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum. Curator Melinda Kralj first spied the white “leucistic” bird hovering around the nectar-filled flowers of a Grevillea ‘Superb’, a shrub in the arboretum’s Australian rock garden. With a watering hose in one hand and her iPhone in the other, Kralj snapped a fuzzy shot of the hummer and began to share her find. Hundreds of visitors have since turned up to catch a glimpse of the brilliant white bird. Leucism is a genetic mutation that causes hair, fur, feathers, and skin to be mostly colorless due to a reduction in melanin pigments, which in hummingbirds normally create black, gray, brown, and reddish-brown coloration in their feathers. The mutation differs from

currents

Two November Ballot Measures

The November ballot features a number of environmental measures, including competing statewide plastic bag propositions and sales tax funding for the Sonoma County Regional Park District. Sonoma’s regional park district is the only one in the Bay Area without its own independent source of funding. An acquisition spree by the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District has left the agency with land for parks, yet without funding to open them to the public or to properly maintain existing parks. So the park district is now seeking a half-cent sales tax increase in unincorporated Sonoma County to pay for development, maintenance, and management of its more than 50 units. Measure J, which needs two-thirds approval, would provide $9.5 million a year over the next 10 years. The district has outlined priority targets for funding, including Tolay Lake (southeast of Petaluma) and Carrington Ranch (on the coast). The funds would also support improvements in existing parks, including Hood Moun- (continued on page 8)

october–december 2016

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Courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios

Bay Area Nature on the Big Screen The nation’s moviegoers got a playful glimpse of Northern California nature this summer. Opening for the blockbuster film Finding Dory is a six-minute animated story about a sanderling chick living in the dune grass along the rugged Pacific coast. Piper follows the little chick’s first attempts to feed in the wavy ruckus of the beach and plumb the sand for invertebrates. The film places you onshore amid a flock of sanderlings skittering from waves with barnacle-studded rocks, ribbons of kelp, and our signature fog as background. The brainchild of Alan Barillaro (below), an animator at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, Piper was inspired by the shorebirds Barillaro spied during his jogs along the Berkeley bayshore. He took a special interest in sanderlings, the small, energetic shorebirds in the “peep” sandpiper genus and b ay n at u r e

THIS IS HOME

news & culture

Courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios

currents

notable for the speedy scissoring of their tiny legs when they run. “I felt like I had an idea there,” says Barillaro, known for his work on Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. To accurately capture life along the shoreline, the Pixar team hung out on Stinson Beach observing the light change over the course of a day, visited the aviary at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to study the pattern and movement of a sanderling’s 4.5 million feathers, and spent time at Bodega Bay’s Doran Beach to get a feel for the dune grass. “It was important for us to have a foot in reality in the Bay Area,” Barillaro says. He also admits to taking some “creative liberties” with the piece. Though its mother is pure sanderling, Piper is an artistic blend of sanderling and snowy plover. Also, sanderlings breed in the Arctic, so juveniles are several months old by the time they reach our beaches in the fall. Regardless, when kids head to the shore this winter, they just may recognize a flock of ‘pipers scurrying from the surf thanks to Barillaro and his team. —Alison Hawkes

october–december 2016

(continued from page 7) tain near Santa Rosa and Helen Putnam in Petaluma. The sales tax would apply only to unincorporated parts of the county, says regional parks director Caryl Hart, as a way of placing much of the burden of the tax on visitors who are drawn to the county for its scenic beauty. “The idea that Sonoma County doesn’t have dedicated park funding is astounding when you consider every other Bay Area county has it,” Hart says. “The time is right, and we’ll make the case to the voters, and I think they’ll agree. Most of the money is going to be coming from tourists, the impact on residents is so slight, and the benefit is so massive.” Proposition 67 on the state ballot would uphold a 2014 law banning grocery stores and pharmacies from providing single-use plastic bags. The law is supported by most Bay Area cities and counties, including San Francisco, which banned plastic bags in 2007. Prop 67 was put on the ballot by plastic bag makers, who want to see the ban overturned by a “no” vote. The American Progressive Plastic Alliance also created Proposition 65, which would require retailers to deposit revenue from the sale of carryout bags into a fund for environmental projects administered by the state Wildlife Conservation Board. (Under the 2014 law, retailers keep the money from bag sales.) If Prop 65 passes with a higher percentage of the vote than Prop 67, the state legislature has said courts will need to decide whether it also overturns the bag ban. Californians use 13–20 billion plastic bags every year, according to Californians Against Waste. Many of those end up in the ocean, where they’re ingested by turtles, fish, birds, and whales. A 2015 report in Science estimated that between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year. —Eric Simons

©Teddy Miller 2016/Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve

openspacetrust.org/ourhome

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october–december 2016

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currents

food & art

signs of the season

A Taste of Bay Laurel Going nuts for the fruits of a California native

courtesy beers made by walking

Brews Inspired by Local Nature No fewer than 120 local breweries have sprung up in the Bay Area in recent years, but the word “local” is somewhat of a misnomer. The beer may be made here, but ingredients are often sourced from far away. Now, however, the national organization Beers Made By Walking (BMBW) is inspiring brewers in San Francisco to bring local terroir to their product. For the second time, BMBW is partnering with Sutro Stewards, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring the native ecology and building hiking trails at Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve in San Francisco. This summer Sutro Stewards offered walks through the hilly forest to introduce commercial craft brewers and the interested public to the delectable and aromatic plants sprouting there, such as lemony-minty yerba buena; mugwort; black sage and hummingbird sage; and (nonnative) plum and blackberries. Beer and native plants is a winning combination for Sutro Stewards. The organization has long rewarded volunteers with a frothy cold one at the end of a day’s restoration work. “That whole concept succeeded in getting us volunteers by the truckload,” says Craig Dawson, co-founder of Sutro Stewards and himself a home brewer. A BMBW walk on Mount Sutro inspired Thirsty Bear’s brewer Brenden Dobel to come up with Yerba Buena Gruit, a hops-free brew made from native mugwort, yarrow, sage, manzanita berries, and San Francisco’s signature understory herb—yerba buena. “I’m from San Francisco and I never paid too much attention to what was around me,” Dopel says. “So it’s been a real eye-opening experience.” He says yerba buena is definitely in his brew again this year. “It’s so damn good.” The Sutro Stewards and BMBW partnership culminates in a November tapping event and fundraiser where brewers will show off the batches they’ve made with local flavorings (purchased from native plant nurseries or foraged with permission on private properties). For details on Sutro Stewards’ fall tapping event, go to sutrostewards.org. —Alison Hawkes

The Art of the Cleanup in Bayview-Hunters Point

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october–december 2016

Photograph by Charles Kennard

sponsored the mural’s creation. “It’s not just the mural. It used to be nobody talked about these things, but now they do.” —Judith Katz

Alexey Dolotov

The Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood is San Francisco’s number-one illegal dumping ground for hazardous waste, particularly motor oil. Everything from single-gallon containers to truckloads of oil drums is abandoned in lots and on streets, not to mention what’s dumped on the ground or into the storm drains. It takes just one gallon of used motor oil to taint a million gallons of clean water, according to the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFDE). To combat the problem, the neighborhood and city have turned to art. A huge mural—100 feet wide by 25 feet tall—now spans a side of Mendell Plaza, near a major transit hub on Third Street and Palou. Along with depicting an army of marine creatures ready to fight oil pollution, the mural urges witnesses to call the city’s 311 information number to report illegal dumping for cleanup. Judging from the response, the mural is helping. Between May 2014, when the project was launched, and April 2016, reports numbered 580, a 32 percent increase over calls during the prior two years. “There’s an increase in environmental awareness in Bayview,” says Barbara Ockle, executive director of the Bayview Opera House, which

currents

leaves to deter pests from Walk down almost any their acorn granaries. trail in the Bay Area’s Unfortunately, biolowoodland hills and cangists have discovered that yons and you’re likely to encounter a California bay bay laurels are prime veclaurel tree arching sinuous tors for the pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, the villimbs over your head, daplain behind sudden oak pling light across your face, and sending a sharp sweetdeath, which has killed bitter smell reminiscent of more than a million oak menthol and camphor and tanoak trees across straight up your nose. California in the last decade The California native or so. The bay tree goes unharmed but provides an Umbellularia californica—also called pepperwood, Oregon ideal host environment for myrtle, California sassafras, A grove of bay laurel trees on a hillside in Marin County’s Loma Alta Open Space Preserve above Fairfax. the spores of P. ramorum to and headache tree—is in the spread to neighboring oaks, same family as the true or Grecian laurel (Laurus nobilis) whose dried, oblong leaves are which may succumb to the disease. growing stale in most home spice racks. California bay can also be used to season stews Five years ago, the Midpeninsula and soups, but be careful—our bay leaf is much more potent than its Mediterranean cousin. Regional Open Space District started cutA hardwood that can live for hundreds of years, the bay laurel tree is emblematic of the ting down selected bay trees—mostly smaller ones growing near large oaks—in the Santa Bay Area for some. It grows only in the “California Floristic Province” in California and southwestern Oregon, and yet it is widespread and highly adaptable within that range. The Cruz Mountains. If done early enough, this trees grow in the foothills and coastal riparian areas, fog-shrouded redwood forests, rainappears to have an impact, according to disdrenched southern Oregon, and the dry southern Sierra Nevada. They’re even adaptable trict biologist Cindy Roessler. The research enough to endure the inland heat of chaparral country in scrub form if they find the is relatively new, “but compared to nearby moisture and shade essential to their survival. They’ve been used for ecological rehabilitacontrol trees, we have seen better survival of coast live oaks, canyon live oaks, Shreve oaks tion projects, including habitat rebuilding, flood control, and riparian-zone restoration. Our bay tree is food for native animals such as black-tailed deer that graze the high-protein, and tanoaks,” Roessler says. early-season leaves and twigs. Steller’s jays forage the fruit, as do western gray squirrels, duskyDespite its hardiness, the bay is threatfooted wood rats, and California mice. Wild pigs eat both the fruits and the roots. The tree’s ened by longer-term shifts in its habitat. A 2008 paper by UC Berkeley scientist dense canopy provides valuable cover and habitat for many woodland species. Humans love the tree too. While the aroma from the leaves may be what first dazzles, David Ackerly suggested that like much of it’s the fruit (known as bay nuts) that send local food foragers scrambling through the woods California’s endemic flora, bay laurels in the fall. And not just because they’re jonesing for the seed of the fruit’s reputed stimulant could lose some of their habitat due to warming temperatures and altered rainfall effect. When dried and roasted properly, the nickel-size seeds also taste like roasted coffee. patterns caused by climate change. Or dark chocolate. Or burnt popcorn. Or all three, depending on whom you ask. But for now, bay laurels are still abunAnd they are versatile. The waxy fat of the seeds gives them a consistency like cacao, so dant in many of our wooded areas. So if when pulverized, they’re easily molded into sweets, brewed into beverages, or blended into you haven’t tried roasted bay nuts yet—or spicy mole sauces. They can also be nibbled alone as crunchy snacks. But don’t gobble a our native bay leaves—well, don’t rest on handful at once. As with the leaves, the flavor is intense. your laurels. —Ali Budner Bay nuts have long been eaten by native tribal peoples in California and Oregon— Cahuilla, Chumash, Pomo, Miwok, Yuki, Coos, and Salinan, to name a few. When powInstructions for preparing bay dered, the oily seeds were pressed into small cakes, then dried and stored to eat through nuts and recipes using them can the winter. A strong tea made from the leaves was considered a good skin wash for bacterial be found on baynature.org/extra. or fungal infections, as well as a head wash for repelling lice and fleas. Tribes also used the october–december 2016

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National Park in 2005. The box above the number is

Richard Neidhardt can easily name his favorite California condor. She’s No. 550 in the condor studbook, a smallstatured female who has—remarkably, given all the obstacles—turned six this year, the age of sexual maturity in females. “I’m crossing my fingers I’ll have another grandchild,” jokes Neidhardt, a retired construction estimator from Point Richmond, who already has four of the human kind. In 2010, he first spotted No. 550, or rather her benefactor, while hiking among the high peaks of Pinnacles National Monument—recently redesignated as a national park—an hour south of Gilroy. She was a pipping egg at that time, ready to hatch, in a padded box strapped to the body of a member of the California condor crew who was rappelling down a cliff face. “She was b ay n at u r e

the one who started it all for me,” recalls Neidhardt, who has since become a ringleader in recruiting volunteers to the park service’s condor program and is raising thousands of dollars for the recovery work through the nonprofit Pinnacles Partnership, a “friends of the park” group. California condors need all the help they can get. Saved from the brink of extinction with a controversial plan in the mid-1980s to bring the remaining nine wild individuals into a captive breeding program, condors have become one of the most highly managed endangered species in history. Wildlife officials, with the help of several zoos, have been steadily growing the population. And in 1992 they began releasing captive-bred fledglings into the wild in an effort to reestablish these mas-

october–december 2016

sive scavengers—the largest soaring birds on the continent—in a core part of their home range, stretching from Pinnacles to the Big Sur coast. Condors once patrolled the skies as far north as British Columbia, but Pinnacles now marks their northernmost breeding area. Other condor populations have been reestablished to the south in Southern California, Baja California, and Arizona. The condors have fared better than expected, with an estimated 80 wild individuals in the Central California flock in 2016, but their recovery has hinged on a highly orchestrated effort to keep them on the upswing. When Neidhardt first saw No. 550, suspended in midair near a cliff face, she was a captive-bred foster egg headed to the nest of firsttime parents who’d failed at producing a viable egg earlier in the season. With a whole lot of human help, she became the first condor chick to hatch at Pinnacles in a century. Now he occasionally spots her as an adult bird in his volunteer work as a condor tracker at the park, though usually not by sight. Every bird is outfitted with a radio transmitter or GPS device and marked with a unique number. The park service, in collaboration with the Ventana Wildlife Society, which covers the Big Sur side of the range, aims to get a signal or a visual on every bird at least every three days. The goal is to track the birds’ locations, and be able to swoop in to help an ailing bird or retrieve it for a necropsy if it dies. Doing so requires a dedicated team of volunteer condor trackers—currently 12 in all—to hike the high peaks or drive through the privately owned ranchland outside the park. The birds rarely stay put for long in their determined search for carrion—from small lizards to large mammals. “We’ve definitely come to rely on volunteers,” says Rachel Wolstenholme, Pinnacles’ condor program manager and a national park employee. “There would be a lot less done if we didn’t have them.” On a hot July morning, we hike up the

Volunteers like Richard Neidhardt use antennae and handheld receivers to track the condors.

Gavin Emmons, gavinemmons.com

Hank Christensen, hankchristensen.com

the radio transmitter.

ization and power lines to ravens preying on the young—by far the greatest threat to their existence is lead poisoning, caused by lead ammunition fragments in the carrion they eat when hunters or ranchers leave behind animal remains. In California, it’s illegal to hunt with lead bullets within the condor’s range for most types of prey, and by 2019 that restriction will apply statewide to all hunting and wildlife pest management. But condors cover a vast territory—flying up to 150 miles in a day—which makes enforcement of the law tricky, particularly in the enormous private ranchlands surrounding the park. So the park service and other condor advocacy groups have focused on public education to turn the tide of tradition and switch people to lead-free bullets. “Ranchers feel like they’re under the burden of so many regulations, so just the fact that there is a lead ban in our area, people are like ‘Holy crap, this is a whole other thing government is telling me I can’t do on my property,’” says Karminder Brown, who heads the San Benito Working Landscapes group for the Pinnacles Partnership. Though the public education effort seems to be helping—through outreach and raffles for non-lead ammunition— condors are still dying from lead poisoning, and many require chelation therapy to reduce elevated levels of lead. Blood tests done annually on every captured bird indicate the majority have elevated levels of lead. “We are managing a population of birds with chronic lead poisoning,” Wolstenholme says. Toxicology research out of UC Santa Cruz is looking at the physiological and behavioral impacts of sublethal doses of lead in condors by measuring changes in the birds’ corticosterone levels, the avian equivalent of the human stress hormone cortisol. The studies, made possible by all the data collected by tracking and trapping birds over the years, should help scientists get a better handle on condor survival and has implications for other bird species, such as eagles and hawks, similarly affected by lead poisoning. “These condors are giving scientists a great gift in that we’re able to learn

Courtesy of Richard Neidhardt

the Oregon Zoo in 2004 and released at Pinnacles

conservation in action

A Pinnacles Partnership for Condors

park’s Condor Gulch Trail to a lookout informally called Doodle & Dottie, a rocky peak studded with chamise and featuring a view of a barren ridge in one direction and a parched valley of ranchlands in the other. Wolstenholme doesn’t get out on the trail much, relying on volunteers to do most of the condor tracking work, but on this day she is demonstrating how it all works. “You have about a 50-50 chance of seeing a condor,” she warns, removing a radio receiver and antenna from her daypack. Though turkey vultures are ever-present, when it comes to tracking condors, you’re most likely to hear one via its transmitter. Beep, beep, beep. Wolstenholme has waved the antenna to a spot where the receiver dial picks up the frequency of No. 525, a female born in 2009. “Each bird is its own radio station,” she tells me. She loses the signal before picking it up again. “It means she’s flying up into range and then out. She could be close, just behind those hills.” Just as important as finding a bird’s signal is not finding it, or even worse, picking up the transmitter’s rapidly beeping signal that warns of inactivity, sort of like a patient in distress on an EKG. We get one of those for No. 463, but Wolstenholme thinks it’s probably a transmitter attached to a tail feather that fell off, though she makes a note to double-check the records back at the office. Although the condor population faces a number of stressors—from urban-

California Condor No. 340 is an adult male hatched at

by alison hawkes

A Pinnacles Partnership volunteer holds a condor as its blood is drawn to check for lead poisoning.

from them about the impacts of lead poisoning on avian species,” says Zeka Kuspa, a UCSC doctoral student who is leading the research. Despite the challenges, the condors are showing remarkable resilience. By the end of 2015, the condor population in California, 155 birds strong, had exceeded the federal recovery goal for California of 150 free-flying birds in a wild, spatially distinct population, though it will take more good years for scientists to conclude that the birds are self-sustaining. The state’s flocks are intermixing and reaching new areas, with one juvenile spotted by a motionactivated wildlife camera on a private forested property near the San Mateo coast in 2014, the first condor sighting in the county since 1904. To Neidhardt, one fact stands out: Last year for the first time in the recovery effort the number of chicks born in the wild in Central California exceeded condor deaths. “That’s a huge victory. What that means is that there are enough breeding pairs out there in the wild that they are able to start replacing themselves,” he says. If the trajectory continues and people stop using lead ammunition, Wolstenholme reckons that in about five to 10 years the population will have grown so large that intensive monitoring of individual birds will no longer be possible—a problem she welcomes. “There’s this feeling, why can’t you just leave the birds alone? My goal is that ultimately we don’t need the tags, the transmitters, the capture and handle. These are wild birds that should eventually be able to live their lives without interference.”

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This fall the small boat launch at Eden Landing will officially become part of the San Francisco Bay Area Water Trail, a network of launches for nonmotorized

This kite aerial photo looks south over Mount Eden

former salt ponds welcome hikers, bikers, birders, and boaters by Robin Meadows I’m standing on a levee near the edge of the Bay, just south of where the San Mateo Bridge touches down in the East Bay. There’s a ribbon of tidal marsh on one side of me and an expanse of mud on the other. The air smells like salt, a steady breeze blows inland, and the sky is a cloudless pale blue. This beautiful spot, fittingly called the marsh viewing area, is on a new trail in the Eden Landing Ecological Reserve near Hayward, where 6,400 acres of salt ponds are being restored to marsh and shorebird habitat. The tide is out, exposing the chocolatebrown mud along the tidal channels, which cut through the muted greens of b ay n at u r e

the pickleweed and cordgrass that cover the marsh. Water mirrors the blue of the sky and zigzags along channels toward the Bay. Dodder—a native parasitic vine that looks like a tangle of thread—adds splashes of Day-Glo orange. But pretty as the marsh is, my eyes are drawn to something else. A patch of mud is crammed with tiny pointy spiral shells, such a multitude that you have to see it to believe it. There must be hundreds. “Snails,” says John Krause, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) biologist who manages the reserve, adding that tidal marshes are rich with life. “A square meter of mud contains millions of

october–december 2016

Creek in Eden Landing Ecological Preserve in September 2014. To the right, construction of the kayak launch is under way. The Bay Trail loop starts at the bridge.

critters.” Farther along, a mud bank is dotted with small round holes and I ask what they are. “Crab burrows,” says John Bourgeois, smiling at my delight. Bourgeois manages the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project that is revitalizing 15,100 acres at three sites, including the reserve we’re exploring. The marsh viewing area is halfway into the new Eden Landing Trail, a 3.8-mile loop that opened to the public last spring. Along with the new trail, the project includes a new kayak launch, 230 acres of salt ponds where shorebirds forage and rest, remnants of the saltworks where Japanese workers labored a century ago, and 630 acres of tidal marsh in various stages of restoration. The opening comes after about eight years and $32 million of restoration work led by CDFW, the California State Coastal Conservancy, and the U.S.

Stephen Ochoa, courtesy of South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project

e den land ing

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hiddenecologies

craft around the Bay.

Rick Lewis

From the trailhead at the end of Eden Landing Road, there is little sign of the natural beauty to come at the marsh viewing area. The trail is part of the San Francisco Bay Trail, and here warehouses come all the way to the landward edge of the reserve. The new trail—suitable for bicycling as well as walking—begins as a paved road flanked by a barren-looking mudflat. But in just a quarter mile, we reach the new kayak launch on the banks of Mount Eden Creek, which flows into the Bay. The

launch will become part of the San Francisco Bay Area Water Trail this fall. A small bridge crosses the creek and leads to a gravel path along 100-yearold levees that circle Eden Landing’s salt ponds. These former commercial salt ponds were established on natural ones. “Crystal salt ponds were scattered across the marsh plain and landward edge. Native Americans harvested salt from them,” says Robin Grossinger, a historical ecologist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute who has reconstructed the pre-European settlement ecology of sections of the Bay shore. The Ohlone gathered salt from shoreline rocks, burned marsh plants for their salty ash, and put willow twigs in the briny ponds to collect the salt crystals that grew on them.

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Fish and Wildlife Service; Ducks Unlimited did much of the design and construction. Next, planners will turn to restoring the 2,200 acres of salt ponds south of the new trail, between Old Alameda Creek and the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel. Restoration there could start in 2020.

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Three white pelicans take flight from the former salt ponds at Eden Landing.

Before commercial salt production began in the mid-1800s, Eden Landing was part of a huge swath of tidal marsh along the South Bay. “There was a continuous band of tidal marshland from San Leandro all the way to Foster City,” Grossinger says. By the 1930s, however, nearly half of the South Bay’s historical tidal marshes had been converted to salt ponds. Those at Eden Landing were commercially operated until 2003, when state and federal governments bought the land for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Most of the Eden Landing salt ponds will be restored to tidal marsh, but some have been kept for shorebirds, and the trail loops around the 230-acre repurposed pond. “All shorebirds use the ponds, but some are salt pond specialists,” Bourgeois tells me, mentioning the red-necked phalarope and the snowy plover, a threatened species, as examples. “We didn’t want to take away their habitat.” Today, long-legged avocets hunt the shallow waters for creatures to eat. A tern, wheeling overhead in a flash of white, bears a tiny fish in its beak. And twice a year, in early spring and again in late summer to fall, millions of migrating shorebirds converge on the Bay. The shorebird pond is subdivided into cells that take advantage of the structure that remains from the saltmaking process, where seawater moved through a series of evaporation ponds to concentrate the salt. “It’s a giant experiment,” Bourgeois says. “We don’t know how salty the birds like the water.” The highest concentration is three times

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narrow evaporation ponds and the hodgepodge of buildings that packed this site a century ago. There’s not much left, but it’s enough to sense the toil of the Japanese men who moved water from pond to pond and shoveled their crystalline harvest into wheelbarrows. The conversion process was lengthy, taking five years to get from seawater to table salt and yielding about 40 tons per acre. Down the trail from the old salt works, a short spur leads to the marsh viewing area. There, I see 30 white pelicans sail low over the marsh and slowly sink out of sight. My last glimpse is the striking black of wingtips against shiny white and then they’re gone. Wait, what just happened? As salt ponds transform back into tidal marsh,“deep channels scour into the landscape,” Krause says, explaining that strong tidal currents from the Bay erode sediment. Some channels are already 10 feet deep and 20 feet wide, plenty of room to hold a flock of birds even when they’re as big as pelicans. Bourgeois likes to come here in the spring, just as the tide starts to go out. “It’s the best time to see shorebirds eat— they hang out on levees waiting,” he says. Krause adds that he also likes it when the tide comes in. “It brings little fish, and big fish follow the little fish, and harbor seals follow the big fish,” he says. Seals come all the way into the reserve and haul out on the marshes.

Cris Benton

Jenny Erbes, courtesy of South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project

Bay Trail

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Back on the trail, we encounter more ramshackle wooden structures. Tall and angled, these were Archimedes screw pumps, wind-powered devices that once moved water from one salt pond to another. They stand on the dry bed of a salt pond with the same moonscape look of the salt works. This repurposed pond is designed for breeding birds, and last year about 100 pairs of snowy plovers nested here. Plovers abandon their nests if people come near, so the loop here closes during their breeding season, which is usually April to late summer. “The ponds were designed to attract nesting birds, so we didn’t want to surround them 360 degrees with people,” Bourgeois says. Once again, I don’t see any plovers, but I do hear the plaintive cries of a pair of avocets. Then I notice their chick: Leggy and long-necked like its parents, but it’s a fluffy brownish gray rather than the sleek cinnamon, cream, and black of adults. The avocets’ distress makes me glad this part of the trail is closed now. Soon we’ve circled back to the mudflat at the trailhead, and I see it with new eyes. Far from being barren, this is land on its way to becoming tidal marsh. Beginning in 2006, levees between the Bay and Eden Landing were breached to let the tide flow back into the reserve and rebuild the marshland. “A monumental amount of sediment has been restored via Mount Eden Creek,” Bourgeois says, adding that once the marshland is high enough, pickleweed and many other native plants will begin to grow on their own. “If you walk here over a number of years, you’ll see continuous changes, and in 20 years we expect it to be mostly vegetated.” Salt ponds are relatively easy to restore, Bourgeois explains, because the basic tidal marsh landforms are not gone, they’re just buried. “The channels are still there and now they’re showing up again,” he says. “It’s not like laserleveled fields in the Central Valley,” Krause adds. “People just put fences around the salt ponds.” The transition between marsh and upland is another story. In the transition zone along the new trail’s entry road, as well as on some

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pond water in long lines that seem to vanish across the pond. They must have had a purpose but it’s hard to imagine what. Given what I’ve learned so far, though, maybe I should have been able to guess: It turns out they are what remains of low walls built long ago to divide the commercial salt ponds into cells. Strange as these wooden relics look, they are nothing compared to what comes next. To me, it’s like the set of a postapocalyptic movie. Krause calls it a moonscape. Merge the two and you’ll know what to expect at the Oliver Salt Works, abandoned in the 1920s and crumbling ever since. An elevated boardwalk takes us from the trail and leads us up over ground so cracked and salt-crusted it feels like an eternal wasteland. Remarkably, snowy plovers choose to nest here—they like white, sandy beaches and this is close enough. All around the boardwalk lie stubs of weathered wood, concrete, and corroded metal, ghosts of the long,

that of the Bay, and it shows: As the water’s salinity increases in the cells, their algae changes from green to orange-red. Near the trailhead, where the salinity is lowest, the pond is an opaque blue. But on the far side, the water is such an intense yellow it glows as the sun shines through. The saltiest water is also thick with brine shrimp and other invertebrates, providing a feast for the birds. At about six inches deep, the pond suits shorebirds with the longest legs. But here and there around the shorebird pond, bits of higher ground rise slightly above the water’s surface. Shorter shorebirds need shallower water, and these mounds provide a range of depths. Krause, the reserve manager, adds that when the tide comes in, some mounds may go under but others always stay dry to entice nesting birds. Snowy plovers are nesting there now, he tells me, and while I don’t see any, I do see the oyster shells put there to help protect chicks from the ravens, peregrine falcons, and other birds that prey on them. Snowy plovers are small birds—“the size of your fist,” says Krause, closing his fingers to demonstrate—and their chicks can hide under an oyster shell with room to spare. Pieces of wood also poke out of the

Mount Eden Creek snakes west and flows into San Francisco Bay at the edge of Eden Landing Preserve. The kite aerial photo was taken at sunset in September 2014. Now exposed to the tides, the marsh vegetation here continues to evolve.

levees, Save the Bay and the Invasive Spartina Project planted native species, including alkali heath and marsh gumplant. Save the Bay also weeds and hand-waters these young plants. Healthy tidal marsh provides a natural buffer

against flooding and sea level rise. For guidance on restoring tidal marsh at Eden Landing, Bourgeois and Krause turned to historical ecologist Grossinger. According to historical documents—including maps, photographs, and travelers’ accounts—Eden Landing’s marsh originally stretched four miles from solid land to Bay. “It was a really huge expanse of tidal marsh,” Grossinger says. “The Bay came

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Eden Landing Trail Map 08/30/16 v4

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Rick Lewis

tr ail almost up to where 880 is now.” The giant marsh was fed by the alluvial fans of two creeks, Alameda and San Lorenzo, that flanked it to the south and north. While Alameda Creek has been channelized and now enters the Bay just south of the reserve, it once meandered through Eden Landing and, as the Bay

Area’s largest creek, deposited tons of marsh-building sediment there. “There was a tremendous network of tidal channels,” Grossinger says. “One hundred and seventy-two miles were directly connected to Alameda Creek.” End to end, the channels were more than twice as long as the Bay itself and, incredibly,

they all fit into just a few square miles of marsh. His map of Eden Landing’s historical tidal channels helped jump-start the restoration. The major channels were lightly scored to get them started again, and now the tides are doing the rest. “The tidal channels will get close to their historical complexity,” Bourgeois says. Already, two endangered species that live only in the tidal wetlands of the Bay Area are moving back to Eden Landing. Ridgway’s rails have returned to the Bay side of the reserve and salt marsh harvest mice to the landward side. As I look across the mudflat at the trailhead, I see the tidal marsh that once was and will be again. Already, I can see the intricate tracery of tidal channels that have begun to reclaim the land.

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Dan Hill

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and intensive labor from 1872 to 1982.

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Old Battery Road, Marin Headlands The little world of Fort Cronkhite lies a scant 15 minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge, down a narrow valley open to the Pacific. Rows of red-roofed barracks front Rodeo Lagoon, where on a clear fall day dozens of dinosaurlike brown pelicans may be milling about on the water and in the air. Past a footbridge to the inviting beach, pick up the Coast Trail to Battery Townsley, a concrete bunker where big guns were mounted in 1940 for San Francisco’s defense. The steep 0.7-mile climb on Old Bunker Road also shows violent geological history in bizarrely buckled ribbon chert exposed by road cuts, but it’s safe to linger and look south over the Marin Headlands to one tower of the bridge, or all the way to Montara Mountain, or west to the Farallon Islands. The Coast Trail continues north, but Old Bunker Road circles east across the hillside and down to the Marine Mammal Center complex for a loop of about 2.5 miles. A worthwhile side trip is Tennessee Point Trail, a 0.4-mile hiking-only spur that skirts the bluffs below the batteries maybe 50 feet above the wide misty ocean, crossing the chaparral and bunchgrass of coastal prairie to a lookout that takes in multicolored cliffs, cormorants sunning on guanowhitened rocks, and surf exploding against basalt headlands and sliding back from tiny inlets. details: A GGNRA shuttle bus serves Fort Cronkhite in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Restrooms and picnic tables are provided; bikes permitted only on Old Bunker Road. —Ann Sieck

Robin Meadows lives in Solano County near the Suisun Marsh. Birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway visit her garden and river otters occasionally run down her street.

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ponds, which produced salt through solar evaporation

Paul G. Johnson, closer2nature.com

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Remnants of the Oliver Salt Company evaporation

Bear Gulch, Pinnacles National Park The Moses Spring, Bear Gulch Cave, and Rim trails loop in Pinnacles National Park goes through a medley of habitats—forest, caves, a man-made lake, and dramatic rock formations—making it an easy and popular destination hike. The 1.5-mile hike starts at the Bear Gulch Day Use Area and slowly climbs on the Moses Spring Trail through woodland above a shallow creek bed with glimpses of the looming fingerlike projections of volcanic tuff that give the park its name. When the trail forks, head left up the Bear Gulch Cave Trail to the caves, although it’s worth noting they’re not actually caves, but rather a jumble of talus boulders that form a labyrinth of chambers through which the path meanders. In the far depths, water trickles down rocks and then Bear Creek itself makes a noisy appearance. A shrunken passage requires a low crouch to get through until an opening to the outside suddenly appears. There a staircase ascends to Bear Gulch Reservoir. From the top of the rock dam, the Rim Trail begins a high-elevation loop back toward the parking 1 lot, showcasing the remains of an 8,000-foot volcano, seen in 3 the fragmented rock, known as breccia, that formed as molten lava cooled some 23 million years ago. Continue to the lower section of the High Peaks Trail, which ends this invigorating hike in a pleasant descent. details: Enter on the east side of the park; $15 per vehicle. Restrooms, water, and information at the visitor center. Bring a flashlight and waterresistant shoes. —Alison Hawkes 1

Phleger Estate This park at the southern tip of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was once heavily logged and occupied by steam-powered lumber mills. Twenty years after becoming a public park, the Phleger Estate today is a tranquil, second-growth coastal redwood forest offering four trails with a combined length of 8.5 miles. The only entrance with parking is through Huddart County Park in Woodside, which flanks Phleger’s southern boundary. Ambitious hikers can combine Phleger and Huddart Park trails for a 12-mile trek. Regardless of your route, pick up trail maps for both parks. Park near the Zwierlein or Werder picnic areas. Begin with the half-mile Zwierlein Trail in Huddart to reach a humble Phleger Estate fencepost placard. There begins the fern-lined Miramontes Trail, which we hiked on a warm day, grateful for the shade under a canopy of redwoods, Douglas firs, and madrones and, in the canyon, the coolness of Union Creek. We met a handful of fellow hikers and joggers; most turned back at the wooden directional sign where Miramontes divides. The longer, steeper Lonely Trail lives up to its name, offering a less well-trod option. You’ll likely see newts and slugs, woodpeckers and jays, and 2 evidence of horses—watch your step—as this is a favorite park for local equestrians. details: Parking in Huddart Park costs $6. Restrooms, water fountains, and tables in the Zwierlein Picnic Area. Dogs not allowed; bicycles not allowed in Phleger. —Brittany Shoot 2

d i s c o v e r m a n y m o r e t r a i l s at b ay n at u r e . o r g /t r a i l f i n d e r b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

b ay n at u r e

exploring the east bay regional parks

This story is part of a series exploring the natural and cultural history and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The series is sponsored by the district, which manages 119,000 acres of public open space in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

A Fishing Expedition

While searching for anglers in the East Bay, writer De Tran encounters a trucker, high-tech marketer, and his childhood memories of Vietnam.

Phoo Chan, phoochan.com [Shadow Cliffs Regional Recreation Area, Pleasanton]; (right) Courtesy of De Tran

by De Tran

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october–december 2016

hoping for striped bass. I strike up a conversation, telling him the latter-day ernest hemingway—tall and rugged, long silver hair flowing from beneath an Oakland A’s cap, a beard, that I’m there on assignment for Bay Nature. My aim is to learn weathered skin—has been fishing in these waters since he was a about the Vietnamese fishing community that uses the East Bay boy in the 1950s. This afternoon, however, he has gone more than parks, talk with a few anglers in our mother tongue, then seven hours without taking a fish. From the pier at Point Pinole chronicle their lives and their love of fishing. I emigrated from Regional Shoreline, a dollop of parkland in Richmond on the Vietnam to San Francisco when I was 12, and, like Reichert, I eastern shore of San Pablo Bay, he can see Mount Tamalpais enjoy fishing. But today, rather than finding my Vietnamese shimmering across the Bay. Above, a couple of gulls compatriots, I’ve found a man who really knows his fish. hover. Below, a few American coots loiter on the water. A He’s reeled in striped bass that are more than 40 inches In 1976, De Tran (center, faint aroma from the eucalyptus groves lingers in the air and sturgeon over seven feet, he says. And, he remarks in red), his along the trails to the pier. wistfully, “We used to have flounder out here…I think siblings, “People say ‘I love to fish,’ but it’s just an excuse,” says the commercial guys got them all.” uncles, and Curtis Reichert. “I love being outside. I’ve been outside Anglers still go for salmon, striped bass, halibut, aunt gather at all of my life.” Reichert, now 70, grew up in nearby San sturgeon, leopard shark, and surfperch at Point Pinole, Fisherman’s Wharf for a Pablo, farmed a little bit, and worked construction too. says ranger Sushawn Robb, but “it’s not as good as it snapshot, a He never married, he says. His one true love has always used to be. In the old days, we got stripers every day.” year after they been fishing—an old man and the sea. Reichert talks about the usual anglers at Pinole and emigrated as While Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” spills out from how over the years the demographics have changed. It refugees from his transistor radio, Reichert casts his lines into the Bay, used to be whites and African-Americans, many drawn by Vietnam. october–december 2016

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construction work for him. Austin lives next door to Feldman, and he and Gust have known each other for years. “We all love San Francisco,” says Feldman, who grew up in Virginia. “I learn from them all the time, as they both grew up here—stuff about the city, stuff about California; more generally, where to fish, how things change season to season and year to year.” He goes on to say that he and Gust share an appreciation for hard cider too. “Kevin is older and has a lot to share about life… It’s good to connect with people who are a little farther down the path, you know. Helps me understand what’s coming my way.” Fishing, Feldman says, is a pastime that parents can share with their children, a way to be in the outdoors and forge connection with each other. “It’s kind of disappointing,” Feldman says, that “it’s not something that fathers do with their sons anymore…” Unfortunately, life’s daily demands don’t leave me much time chatting with plata and his kids does little to allay my for fishing anymore. Working now as a chef, I am more intimate worries about finding a Vietnamese angler. When I get with preparing seafood than with catching it. My cooking fuses home I call a Vietnamese neighbor with a fishing boat, my two cultures, East and West. I’ve discovered that asking for help locating this elusive fishing commuEach winter, adding a few dashes of fish sauce to garlic, white wine, nity. He has little advice to offer, so I plan to try my large schools and butter brings more depth to the traditional shrimp luck again at Point Pinole. When I ride the park’s of Pacific scampi dish. And I’ve found that a sprinkle of chopped shuttle from the parking lot to the pier—given that herring spawn in the Bay, it’s a 1.5-mile walk to the pier, it’s a nice service for kaffir lime leaves on a piece of pan-seared salmon drawing flocks people with fishing gear—I query Ranger Robb who imparts a wonderful citrus fragrance to the fish. of birds and is driving the shuttle. anglers, as “The Vietnamese fishermen tend to fish off the shore shown here at because they catch more fish there,” says Robb, who has after coming up empty three times, I decide to make Miller/Knox been a ranger for 17 years. “They’re the only fishermen I one last trip to Del Valle in Livermore. But I’m losing Regional Shoreline in see who put on waders.” hope. When I arrive at the reservoir, I seek out an expert Richmond in On this particular day, however, the shore was almost for help. I’ve heard about Dan “The Captain” Hollis, January 2015. devoid of people. Out on the pier, I encounter three who works at the Lake Del Valle Marina, a small bait and fishing buddies tackle shop, a place to ease hanging out together, your boat into the water and bantering like teenagdock it. ers as they cast their “You get all sorts of people lines. Ben Feldman is here,” says Hollis. The fishing giving Derek Gust a enthusiasts who have come hard time about his through the marina resemble fondness for shrimp members of the cast of chips, a popular Asian Gilligan’s Island: scientists from snack that can be an acquired taste for Westerners. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” Feldman says, while Kevin Austin nods in agreement. “It’s bait.” The conversation then turns to their shared love of bánh mì, the the nearby Lawrence Vietnamese sandwich. Livermore National The three friends—Feldman is a high-tech marketer, Gust is a Laboratory, millionaire oil building contractor, and Austin is a big-rig driver—share a love executives, even an occasional of fishing. Feldman got to know Gust when Gust did some Hollywood movie star.

work in the nearby shipyards. Today, there are more Asians and Hispanics, and with them, the languages spoken at the pier have become more diverse: Spanish, Tagalog, Cambodian, Vietnamese. More women are trying their hands at tackles and lures too, though fishing here remains a predominantly male pastime. Wishing him well, I head down the pier to say hello to Jim Tumaneng, an immigrant from the Philippines looking for striped bass. He has been laid off from his construction job, so he rides his bike here a few times a week to pass the time. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful,” he says. “I don’t want to stay home. I’d eat too much, and then lie down and watch TV… It’s not healthy.”

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

Elaine Miller Bond

Elaine Miller Bond, elainemillerbond.com

De Tran

i started fishing when I was a boy growing up in Vietnam during the height of the war. The adults, for the wineries, farmhouses and ranches. Cows, goats, and sheep most part, did their best to shield us kids from it, and Fishing in the Bay since graze under cottonwood trees and oaks. The road then fishing became an escape from the strife; being on the the 1950s, darts and dips through a series of hills and valleys before water was a refuge from the bullets and bombs. On Curtis Reichert ending at Del Valle Regional Park, 4,400 acres of open Sundays, we would head to my grandparents’ farm in the casts from the hills and oak woodlands. Some 15 species of fish reside in country, where we fished for trout and tilapia in the pier in Point the five-mile-long narrow reservoir; most came in from stream that ran through the orchards of mango, jackfruit, Pinole Regional the Delta when water pipes were installed as part of the guava, and banana trees. The first fish I ever caught was a Shoreline park, California State Water Project system. tiny tilapia from the stream, not much bigger than a hoping to Lakeside among the anglers, I come upon Rene Plata, child’s hand, but my mom made an elaborate production hook a striped who is fishing with his 12-year-old son Alex and 9-yearout of it. She fried it, prepared a special sauce, and made bass. old daughter Madison. The fish haven’t been biting, but sure everyone in the family tasted my epic achievement. that is beside the point. I see parents and kids fishing from the Point Pinole “They like getting out here and being involved with Mother pier, as they have for generations. The pier stretches 1,250 feet Nature,” the 40-year-old Modesto resident says. “It’s a different into the Bay and was built in 1977. Park officials say roughly 30 pace out here. When we’re out here, we talk about life, about visitors a day come here to fish. But today none of them seem to events that happen in life, that their life is not just about hail from my home country, so I head back to shore with plans computer gaming, it’s not about materialistic things. There’s to visit Lake Del Valle next week. more to life. There’s Mother Nature, there’s the wilderness, not Del Valle and Point Pinole are among the 11 lakes, two piers, just the techy stuff.” and more than 25 miles of Bay and Delta shoreline designated Plata works inventory control for a food-processing factory for fishing in the East Bay Regional Park District, covering in the Central Valley. His grandparents came to Texas from Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The fish are a mix of Mexico, but he was born and raised in San Jose. Fishing was part nonnative and native species of California halibut, striped bass, of his growing up. jacksmelt, sharks, and rays along the salty shoreline, to rainbow When my family immigrated as refugees from Vietnam to trout, black bass, and catfish further inland. All but two of the San Francisco in the summer of 1975, a dozen of us lived lakes are seasonally stocked with trout and catfish. crammed in a studio apartment overlooking Dolores Park. At night we slept side by side next to each other on the floor like canned sardines. We didn’t have much, but our family was the sun-drenched country road to Lake Del Valle winds extremely close—a closeness that strained as we bent to the through rural Livermore. On its two sides are vineyards and

pressures of school and career and the pursuit of the American dream. I learned English in public schools, worked as a newspaper boy in the Mission to help out the family. To escape the cramped apartment, my siblings and I would lug our crab nets onto the J Church trolley, transfer to the 47 line, and go hunting for Dungeness crab off the pier at the end of Van Ness Avenue. It was cold and joyous and unforgettable. America was gleaming new to me then, every little thing a wondrous discovery, even the fishing equipment. The poles here were crafted from graphite, carbon, and fiberglass with fancy spinning reels. In Vietnam, a fishing pole was a bamboo stick with a line attached to a hook and sinker.

Jerry Ting

“We’re the last lake before you get out of the Bay Area,” Hollis says. “People come here to get away from the big cities.” Hollis is part fishing guide, part docent. He says the presence of flocks of birds can tell you where the fish are. He points to where a couple of bald eagles have nested. He loves it most of all when the anglers get the fish to bite. “I want to hear them hooting and hollering when they see their lines jumping,” he says. There are two things, Hollis says, that anglers hold close to their vests: the baits they use and the locations of their fishing spots. Fishers don’t like to discuss their favorite baits for catching particular fish, be it worms, anchovies, squids, sardines, or PowerBait (used for trout fishing). And all seem to have a favorite fishing spot, Hollis says. “Everyone is super secretive.” I leave Hollis and look out at Del Valle’s blue expanse. This assignment has become my damned white whale. The closest I’ve come to finding a “thriving” Vietnamese fishing community was a bored Cambodian man skipping rocks at Point Pinole waiting for the fish to bite. But I’ve also found some memories. Looking back at my childhood in Vietnam, I can see that those days fishing on the water gave me a modicum of peace during the war. And in those early days in America, fishing gave me a chance to adapt to the new land by doing something familiar, something Hao Nguyen connected to my previous life. Fishing is grew up fishing like that. It links the past and present, the with a bamboo old country and New World, the eagerpole for tilapia ness to catch the fish and the peace that and catfish in comes while waiting. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. And then, just like that, I hooked one. I Here he fishes meet Hao Nguyen. Covered in a hooded for rainbow jacket, he is casting for rainbow trout at trout at Lake Del Valle with a friend. He has taken in a Del Valle. half dozen trout since the morning. He

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f i s h i n g

Fishing lakes in the East Bay Regional Park District include Lake Del Valle, Lake Chabot, Shadow Cliffs, Quarry Lakes, Contra Loma, Don Castro, Lake Temescal, Jordan Pond, Lake Anza, and Shinn Pond. For information on fishing permits and licensing, classes and angler updates, visit: ebparks.org/activities/fishing.

fishes every chance he gets, sometimes just by himself. His wife often complains, he says. But she fails to understand his obsession. Fishing takes him back to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam where he grew up and used to fish in the streams amid the verdant rice fields. He would use a homemade fishing pole fashioned out of bamboo to troll for catfish and tilapia. The Mekong Delta was the food basket of Vietnam, and its waterways teemed with fish and blue crabs and shrimp. In America, he still cooks the simple country meals of his rural homeland. A striped bass caught from Del Valle, for example, would be turned into a soup with rau ngót, a sweet leaf vegetable from the tropics. Other fish would be fried with lemon grass, with garlic fish sauce for dipping. “Sometimes I can’t sleep, thinking about it. Everyone has a passion. This is mine,” says the San Jose resident, who works in the computer industry. “Waiting for the fish to bite is one of the great joys in life.” And it gets me thinking: Maybe I should get back in the game, not so much to catch the fish, but those memories of my youth. De Tran, a former staff writer at the San Jose

Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times, is now a Bay Area executive chef.

De Tran

Want to learn more about the native fish swimming in the EBRPD

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

lakes and ponds? Go to baynature. org/extra for more information.

Nate Wilson

Sometimes to save a river, you have to buy it. Western Rivers Conservancy focuses on one thing: buying land along the West’s greatest streams. We do it for the sake of fish, for the benefit of wildlife and to improve access along our most treasured waters for hikers, birders and wildlife watchers. Most of all, we do it for the river. In northern California, we just launched an effort to conserve the Scott River (pictured), California’s single most important river for threatened coho salmon. To support our work, or learn more about our efforts on the Klamath, Deer Creek, Goose Creek and other California streams, please visit www.westernrivers.org or call us at 415-767-2001.

For the first time in decades, river otters are swimming and sliding their way back into Bay Area waterways. A team of scientists and volunteers is studying why they’ve returned and how to keep them here.

Jaymi Heimbuch, jaymiheimbuch.com

by Kat McGowan

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october–december 2016

Scott Doniger

welcome back otters

We’re peering down into a ravine carved out by Lagunitas Creek, looking for North American river otters. According to official California Department of Fish and Wildlife records, last updated in 1995, we are officially fools; there are no otters anywhere near here. They are “nonoccurring,” wiped out from most of the Bay Area long ago by trapping, pollution, lack of prey, loss of habitat—any and all of the difficulties that wild animals contend with in urban areas. ¶ But according to the data collected in the last four years by Megan Isadore and her corps of citizen otter spotters, these little fish-eating predators are all over the place, particularly here in Marin County. On the website of her small nonprofit River Otter Ecology Project, the reports of sightings pour in, from anglers and dog-walkers and nature lovers and amazed suburbanites: Hey, I just saw an otter! As of 2016, ROEP has catalogued more than 1,730 sightings and added to that tally close to 5,000 camera-trap videos and photos and roughly 1,300 samples of otter scat. ¶ And this just seems like an ottery kind of place—a creek full of fish and crayfish, banks dense with shrubby growth, a place that feels wild enough for a sneaky little carnivore to hunt and hide and play. Isadore and her volunteers-in-training, Emma Sharpe and Jeffrey Wang, current and former wildlife biology students, crane their necks over the embankment. Nothing here. But farther up the path, in an outfall below a big dam, we find a tidy pile of fresh scat, the highest standard of otter evidence. Yes, they’ve been here too. ¶ The fact that otters are back in the Bay Area of their own accord without any reintroduction program to help them looks like a reason to declare victory. It seems to be proof that cleaning up watersheds makes a difference, that restoration works, that species will bounce back if we only push hard enough. “Their recovery in the Bay Area is, I believe, the result of conservation and restoration activities: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all these things we did that had a positive effect,” Isadore says.

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Until 1961, river otters in California were trapped for that fur. In Humboldt and Mendocino counties up north and in the Delta, otters managed to hang on. But from San Francisco Bay south, they vanished. Hunting was probably only part of it; water pollution may

2 On a June morning, Megan Isadore and ROEP intern Emma Sharpe visit the Giacomini Wetlands in west Marin to survey otter signs. They collect scat samples for DNA analysis, research that will help determine each local population’s range and interactions.

have been a big reason for the decline. Pesticides, heavy metals, and other water pollutants can make otters sick, reduce their breeding success, and kill off the fish they depend on. The Eurasian otter offers a useful comparison. In southern England, those otters vanished even though they were never hunted, apparently due to pollution such as mercury and organochlorine pesticides like DDT derivatives, dieldrin, and lindane. Once the rivers were cleaned up, the otters came back. A North American river otter weighs c o l l e c t i n g s cat 1 In the Bay Area, rumors of river on average 20 pounds and is roughly otter presence began in the late three feet long from extremely whiskery 1980s, but there was no bulletproof sighting until Rich Stallcup, front end to oddly flattened tail. (“Much smaller than you’d a founder of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, spotted them think,” Isadore says.) It features what must be the most boopable just south of the town of Tomales in 1989. (“I was stoked and snoot of any mammal, a large flattened moist “rhinarium,” or elated to find three of these excellent creatures,” he wrote.) They nose pad. A river otter is a mustelid, like a weasel or a badger. might have arrived from the Delta or possibly from up north. But in terms of physique, it splits the difference between land Either way, it was surprising but not shocking: River otters are and water mammals. It swims and runs passably well but is known to travel long distances, particularly when young males neither as adept as a seal in water nor as stealthy as a mink on disperse in the spring, while water runs high. They follow creeks, land. With no blubber, it relies on a dense, luxurious coat of fur even through culverts and tunnels, but will also cross dry land; to stay warm. As it humps along a shoreline, the overall impresthey might have even hopscotched down the coast. sion it creates is something like a Slinky in a fur coat. b ay n at u r e

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Isadore saw her first otters in 2002, in the moonlight on a tributary of Lagunitas Creek. Soon they seemed to be everywhere, and yet, officially, nowhere. River otters aren’t endangered, so they aren’t a focus of conservation money and planning. But Isadore knew that without collecting baseline data on them, it would be impossible to monitor them—to know if their populations were increasing, stabilizing, or crashing, or to come up with plausible ideas about why. She realized someone would need to step up in order to make sense of what was really going on. Isadore had worked with SPAWN, a salmon-restoration nonprofit in Marin, for 13 years, learning field biology and stream ecology and eventually becoming lead naturalist. Focusing on otters seemed to be the obvious next step for her. “The vision was to establish where they were in the Bay Area, and then do population studies,” she says. ROEP

s e t t i n g ca m e r a t r a p s began in 2012 as a science-based, data-gathering organization. Her co-founder Paola Bouley, a wildlife biologist, was the first executive director; Isadore’s husband, Terence Carroll, a longtime conservationist, would be president. Isadore and Bouley also banked on otters’ natural charms as a great way to get Bay Area residents invested in the watersheds in their backyards. “The river otters are such perfect ambassadors, because they’re so playful and adorable, and a little bit elusive,” she says. (People who study otters, unlike other biologists, don’t even pretend that their subjects aren’t cute.) Otters could be a gateway drug. ROEP now counts otters in two ways. Anyone can report an otter sighting online by providing enough details to rule out mistakes. But that only tells you where otters are. In order to get other dimensions of information—what they’re doing, what their niche might be—the group also trains and sends out

volunteers who visit specific field sites weekly throughout the summer and early fall, when mothers have brought their new pups out from their dens and most other otters tend to stay put in their territories. Using an app designed to capture otter data, volunteers record the locations of signs (latrines, paw prints, tail drag marks, slides, dens), maintain motion-activated camera traps, and review the footage to document family life and behavior. (The cameras have 4 caught other creatures too: bobcats, a badger, a merlin, baby foxes, and once a woman skinnydipping.) This method provides a more granular view of otter life across various shorelines of Marin, stretching from Rodeo Lagoon just north of the Golden Gate, along the Pacific up to Abbotts Lagoon, including sites along Tomales Bay, all the way up Lagunitas Creek to the reservoirs, as well as other marshes, lakes, and creeks. Volunteers also gather scat samples for two projects: monitoring for Vibrio and Salmonella—bacteThey also added a new camera ria common in other aquatic trap to their network of cameras mammals—and DNA analysis. along shorelines in Marin County. Some sites are wild, but others The photos, retrieved weekly by are right off of major roads, volunteers, help capture family because otters can put up with interactions and population size. quite a bit of human contact. In the East Bay, they loll around in Oakland’s Lake Temescal, in the shadow of two freeways. One has been seen at the lake next to the Hilltop Mall in Richmond. And then there was Sutro Sam, who took up residence at San Francisco’s Sutro Baths in 2012. He spent months devouring the fish in the ponds there, undeterred by the legions of fans who came to see him, some bringing trout from the nearby Safeway. It wasn’t until the fish ran out that he left.

Isadore saw her first otters in 2002, in the moonlight near Lagunitas Creek. Soon they seemed to be everywhere, and yet, officially, nowhere.

Jaymi Heimbuch (4)

An otter seems to live for pleasure, gliding in and out of the water, rolling and romping, loudly crunching on crayfish, clowning around. That this joyous creature has returned to the Bay Area seems like sweet reward for the years of hard work by conservationists and environmentalists, a sign that we won—won the wriggly, furry, goofy jackpot. But in truth, it’s not yet clear how many local otters there are or why they came back, which means no one has determined how to protect or maintain them here. That’s why Isadore launched ROEP. “We don’t know where they are, how many, whether populations are increasing or we just think they are,” she says. “That was the impetus.” If people have the general impression that there are a lot more otters around than there used to be, and in places where they weren’t seen before, that’s one thing. It’s far more useful to have data—systematically collected evidence. With only a minuscule budget, ROEP depends on the natural charms of otters and the enthusiasm of volunteers to collect as much high-quality information as possible. There’s reason to think the return of the otters may be tenuous. That’s why these three are clambering up and down banks, climbing under docks, exploring culverts, poking every bit of scat along the way. Can we breathe a sigh of relief ? Are the otters here to stay? We don’t yet know. Sharpe and Wang put fresh batteries and data cards into a motion-sensitive wildlife camera and strap it to a redwood tree near the outfall. Isadore demonstrates how to scoop up bits of fecal material into glassine bags for future study. These two volunteers, and dozens more, will revisit this spot and others for the rest of the summer and into the autumn, wading up and down Lagunitas Creek, scouting out lagoons and beaches, kayaking and biking to remote field sites. This is the slow, painstaking work that can begin to explain the return of the otter.

Out in Point Reyes National Seashore, Isadore has her own field site at Abbotts Lagoon, where salt water and fresh water mix down near the sea. We’re walking along a trail toward a passage between two lagoons when Isadore suddenly stops and hisses, “Look! Otters!” The carpet of whorled marshpennywort in the shallow end of the lagoon quivers. Then suddenly a lithe brown body october–december 2016

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We leave the otters to their breakfast and return to the dune; Isadore is eager to get some of this supremely fresh scat. For the record, otter fecal material does not smell like the turds of carnivores you may be more familiar with. It has a musky, fishy, wild aroma, not unpleasant if you don’t mind the smell of low tide, and it’s flecked with fish scales and bits of shell. Otters also excrete a jelly-like substance that apparently protects their guts from sharp shell fragments and fish bones. There’s plenty of that stuff here too, looking like blobs of blackish Jell-O. Isadore scoops up some as well. A key thing to know about river otters: Excretions are a very big deal for them. Latrines are communication stations, where animals frequently stop by to leave small symbolic fecal deposits, make scent secretions using the glands in their hind feet, and investigate what else has been left behind. (Kruuk reckons that no carnivore produces scent-mark feces more frequently than an otter does.) It’s sort of an otter Foursquare: a brief record of who was here and what they had for lunch. Consequently, otter scientists are also deeply interested in poop— examining it, testing it, even playing tricks with it. In one set of experiments, Humboldt State University wildlife biologists Jeffrey Black and Alana Oldham added scat from faraway otters to a local latrine, then documented the response. When the regulars returned, they obsessed over the foreign poop, investigating it and covering it with their own. “There were 20 times as many paw prints, all around the new scat,” says Black. “They pee on top of it, and leave their own scat.” Exactly what otters learn from scat is not clear, but it might include gender, hormonal status, and other updates. For scientists, these deposits provide a dietary record; researchers dig through scat for otoliths, the characteristic bony structures in vertebrate ears, to identify which fish species otters eat. With other kinds of testing, scat can reveal pollution exposure or, through DNA analysis, a map of genetic relationships. So researchers like Isadore are thrilled when they find brand-new scat—it’s a bigger database with more information. Usually that’s left to chance, but one enterprising Canadian research group developed a way to identify the freshest, most testable scat by scattering latrines with a layer of glitter. The next

Rick Lewis

(right) An otter shakes off water, a common otter behavior, after emerging from the manmade lake at Heather Farms, a city park in Walnut Creek. (below) An adult and two pups roll in the sand and dirt on the bank of Lake Temescal in Oakland.

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to spot an otter

How they interact with other animals is likewise not very well known. Coyotes might prey upon otters under some circumstances, but the interactions between the two are not always straightforward predator-prey relationships. One of Isadore’s most fascinating camera-trap videos captures the meeting of an otter and a coyote. The coyote trots across the otter’s beach—her territory. The two circle one another on the sand, then chase each other round and around a rock, just like in a cartoon. Are they threatening one another? Checking each other out? Neither one looks frightened. Rather, they both seem wary, but curious— maybe even a little bit playful. Isadore has shown the video to several otter specialists, and none of them were sure what’s going on either. “We can’t bring ourselves to say, ‘Yes, they’re playing,’” she says. “But we all want to.”

Want to spot an otter? When you’re near a shoreline—a wetland, creek, lake, bay, or the ocean—look for the following tracks and signs. And then keep your eyes open for a fast, sinuous motion in the water, at or just below the surface. <tracks A perfect set of river otter tracks will show the webbing between its toes and the indentations from its nails. The back paws are slightly larger than the front. Also look for a thick, long drag mark behind the tracks made by the otter’s tail. slides> Otter slides can be spotted in sand, grass, mud, and even snow. Depending on the frequency of use, the slides can range from roughly 8 to 12 inches wide and be as long as 25 feet.

(From top): Sharron Barnett, marinnature.com; Scott Doniger; Kim Cabrera; Map Courtesy of the River Otter Ecology Project

weight each day—far more than most mammals of similar size. So although they prefer fish, they’ll eat nearly any meat, including frogs, crayfish, shellfish, insects, small mammals, and birds. ROEP volunteers find the feathers of pied-billed grebes, coots, and cormorants in scat; at Rodeo Lagoon, otters have been witnessed killing brown pelicans. These little carnivores live on a metabolic knife’s edge, suggest studies conducted by Hans Kruuk, honorary professor at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen and perhaps the world’s preeminent otter expert. To eat, they must swim in cold water. To stay warm without blubber, they must fuel the body furnace with caloriedense food. Otter life is a Catch-22 of hunting to stay warm and staying warm to hunt. On top of that, otters have a low reproductive rate, with an average of only one to three pups a litter, and they generally don’t breed every year. And many river otters have short lives. While they can live as long as 25 years in captivity, the median age of a population in Prince William Sound in Alaska was only four years. The average annual mortality for adults is about 27 percent, according to one study in western Oregon. This is why it’s so important to know more about Bay Area otter populations, says Isadore. What kinds of fish do they depend on? Are they breeding successfully, and how often and where? In an otter’s life, there’s little room for error. Given their extraordinary metabolisms, they require plentiful prey and may be particularly sensitive to slumps in fish populations that occur as a result of climate change or other shifts. It’s important to know how many otters are around for the sake of other creatures as well. Top predators, they scarf up crayfish and fish, particularly slow bottom-dwellers like sculpin. “They eat them like potato chips,” says Isadore. For that same reason, otters may be a boon to other species. Eelgrass beds provide nurseries for many baby fish, including salmon smolt. As otters prowl through the eelgrass, they ignore the tiniest fish, but snap up the bigger fish that prey upon the little ones. The impact of otter predation on Bay Area ecosystems is unknown and is another subject Isadore would like to study.

Sally Rae Kimmel, Flickr.com/people/sallyraekimmel

bursts from the water and lopes up the steep sand dune. It’s followed by another, and then another, and now there are six—a carnival of otters snorting and rolling in the sand. We have a perfect view of them, and it’s hard to know where to look amid the frolicking. Two slink their way up the slope, inspecting a latrine where other otters have left their scat. One defecates with great enthusiasm, waggling its hindquarters vigorously and stamping its hind feet. The other toboggans on its belly down the dune into the water, and then, just as abruptly as they appeared, this tangle of sleek brown creatures is gone. Three of the group are now hunting the shallow water along the edge, and we follow parallel on shore to watch. We see nostrils, eyes, whiskers, and teeth, then the curve of a small back as it dives. One surfaces, making plaintive little peeps. Another pops up to devour some prey, crunching away like a svelte brown Cookie Monster. Based on their sizes and contact calls, there could be two adult females accompanied by a few new pups, Isadore guesses. The other two could be last year’s pups, or even older daughters. (Otter family composition is flexible but generally does not include fathers, who leave after mating.) Each season is its own little mystery; as Isadore watches this group over the summer she’ll gradually figure out who is related to whom. With otters, there aren’t many rules. They do perfectly well alone, but loose groups are also common; they tolerate one another, sharing overlapping turfs, and may even hunt cooperatively. Males may form “bachelors pods” of as many as a dozen, hanging out together for otter parties: piling up vegetation to pee and defecate on it. Otters hunt at night, or at dawn, or during the day. They’re smart enough to target particular species when they know those fish are sleeping. They prefer shallow areas, but will hunt any area with easy-to-catch fish—streams, lagoons, ponds, estuaries, even the ocean. They often rest on banks with shrubby, dense growth, but will nap on a beach if they feel secure. In general, they stay close to shore; theirs is a linear world, a thin boundary strip of water and land. The only unbreakable rule of being a river otter is to eat a lot. These creatures consume 12 to 15 percent of their body

< scat Otter scat can vary in shape from a tube to a patty, but it is almost always full of fish scales, and smells, well, fishy. It is frequently found on top of soil or debris mounds. they’re everywhere > The River Otter Ecology Project maintains an interactive map of Bay Area otter sightings reported by citizen scientists. To expand the map and read about each submission, or even submit your own sightings, visit ROEP online: riverotterecology.org.

day, new productions would be obvious: glitter-covered scat was old; scat without glitter was new. But poop is just part of otter science. Ideally, the information it yields is combined with other types of data. More than 15 years ago, Black began the first otter-spotter project in California in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Sightings from his spotters, (continued on page 40) primarily former biology students, anglers october–december 2016

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flammable compared to what? Twenty-five years after the Oakland Hills fire, people still disagree about whether blue gum eucalyptus is a fire threat in the East Bay Hills. by Z a c h S t. G e o r g e | i l l u s t r at i o n by m a gg i e c h i a n g

The gums are mottled tan and brown like chicken bones, crowded together, the spaces between them choked with brush and hung with streamers of bark. Along with the sweet medicine smell of the trees, there is the warm scent of sawdust and a sour hint of exhaust. I’m with Brad Gallup, a fire captain with the East Bay Regional Park District. We’re deep in Tilden Regional Park, standing on a fire road between a feller buncher and a chipper. It’s his job to make sure that if and when this forest burns, it doesn’t take half of Berkeley with it. In front of us on the uphill side of the road is what looks like a group of seven trees but is really a single tree with multiple boles. Like many of the trees in this forest, it was cut after the hard frost of 1972. Tasmanian blue gums, Eucalyptus globulus, don’t like cold. But the frost didn’t really kill the trees, only made them retreat back down into their roots. The workers who cut the trees then didn’t treat the stumps with herbicide, and now they’re regrown, more trunks and closer together.

The ground below this tree is littered with its rooster-tail leaves and cinnamon-stick tubes of bark. More bark peels from the trunks and spills out from piles built up in the valleys between them. Gallup considers the gum, buried in a pyre of its own debris. “That’s a great way to get the tree to burn,” he says. “Like, you couldn’t come up with a better way to get that tree to burn.” This tree is surrounded by others just like it; this grove just one of the dozens between here and Lake Chabot, millions of blue gums billowing from the ridgeline like sage-green smoke. The 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills, which killed 25 people and destroyed more than 3,000 homes, confirmed for many people what they had long suspected: Eucalypts are a hazard. Though the fire started in grass, the trees were blamed for the severity of the disaster, by some estimates contributing almost three-quarters of the fire’s energy. Last year, after a decade of planning and legal hurdles, the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a $5.7 million fire prevention

What is ostensibly a debate about fire science is more than that, though—it is really just the latest episode in a decades-old dispute over the Australian trees’ place in the Bay Area. There are plenty of people who simply like the trees for their own sake, but the debate is also about deeper questions, like what it really means for a species to be native or nonnative, what really constitutes natural, and even whether it is hubris to imagine that

Eucalyptus and Fire Management in the East Bay Hills (2016)

Map by GreenInfo Network

Data sources: LSA Associates Inc., FEMA Fire Risk Reduction EIS, CAL FIRE, and CPAD 2016a

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humans can break our habit of wreaking unintended consequences. The original question—whether blue gums are uniquely, dangerously flammable—often serves as proxy to these other debates. But it is plenty complicated on its own. Gallup is characteristically diplomatic. “Every piece of vegetation is flammable,” he says. “It’s not just eucalyptus we target. We target grass. We target brush.” He studied forestry and says he can understand the attachment people feel. “I love trees,” he says. At the same time, anyone who’s fought a fire in eucalyptus understands why they need to be thinned, he says—all vegetation will burn, that’s true. But some of it burns better. From the brush down at the bottom of the gully, there is the whine of a chain saw.

In the bay area, though, it’s not enough to just say the blue gums are flammable, Dave Maloney points out as we drive from Walnut Creek toward Berkeley. Many of the hills on the east side of the Caldecott Tunnel are covered in grass, speckled with drooping oak, much as the landscape above Berkeley and Oakland would’ve looked before Oakland developer Frank Colton Havens planted them with eucalyptus. We pass through the tunnel and drive into the hills. Thickets of eucalyptus spring up on either side, their leaves and bell-shaped nuts cluttering the roadside. We stop at a turnout and hike up a path through tall grass that opens into a field. In the middle of the field is a pile of eucalyptus logs, surrounded by waist-deep thistles and grass. The real question, Maloney says, is “flammable compared to what?” Maloney is a retired firefighter. He is among the pro-eucalyptus faction’s star fire authorities, although his expertise, he admits, is not in wildland fire. He was head of fire prevention at the U.S. Army base in Oakland at the time of the 1991 fire and was one of several dozen people on the Forestry and Revegetation subcommittee of the Task Force on Emergency Preparedness and Community Restoration, convened by Mayor Elihu Harris of Oakland in 1992. He says the FEMA plan ignores both the task force’s findings and good sense—that removing the trees would actually make the hills more liable to burn, as exemplified by this field, once covered in blue gums, now thick with grass and thistles. Grass and brush will catch fire more easily than a tree, Maloney says. It’s the same reason that crumpled newspaper will ignite more easily than a log—a fire requires oxygen, heat, and fuel, and grass and balled-up paper are airier and easier to heat to the point of ignition. (It’s also why, even in the hottest fire, it’s almost always a tree’s branches and leaves burning, not its trunk.) Because its components are easier to ignite, a grass fire can also spread much faster than a fire in trees. Second, Maloney says removing the eucalyptus would also remove windbreaks.. In many parts of the state, people planted eucalyptus for that express purpose; the wind inside a forest might have less than half the wind speed it would in the open. In the same way that blowing on a campfire will rouse the coals, wind increases the amount of oxygen to a fire and hastens its spread. Finally, Maloney says, cutting the trees would make the hills drier, both by increasing the amount of sun hitting the ground and because the trees collect condensation on their leaves. Trees near the ridgeline can collect inches of fog-drip a year, sometimes even rivaling the amount they might collect from rainfall. We drive next to Signpost 29, for another view of the possible future. In the early 2000s, UC Berkeley and the nonprofit Claremont Canyon Conservancy cleared 70-odd acres on the south side of Claremont Avenue. Now it is regrown with native willows, bays, oaks—the species that advocates of the FEMA plan insist will, with some human help, replace the eucalypts—as well as redwoods, nonnative thistle, fennel, and broom. It looks scrubby and multitextured compared to the stand of blue gum across the road. For advocates of the FEMA

Some 600 members of genus Eucalyptus dominate forests across Australia. There, the debate isn’t over whether the trees are flammable, says David Bowman, a fire ecologist at the University of Tasmania, but about whether the trees have simply evolved to survive fire, or whether they actually promote fire as a way to snuff out competitors. “It’s an amazing just-so story,” he says of the possibility: “Eucalypts evolved to burn their neighbors.” It’s clear that fire benefits the trees. “For most eucalypts, fire was not a destroyer but a liberator,” writes fire ecologist Stephen Pyne in his book Burning Bush. Many species of eucalyptus both tolerate fire, hiding from the flames behind thick bark, and depend on it to open their seed pods. Fire often even seems to have a rejuvenating effect on the trees. After a fire, many eucalypt species will sprout epicormic shoots along their entire trunks. In the event that a fire does destroy the aboveground parts of the tree, it can send up new shoots from lignotubers, nutrient-filled organs hidden among its roots. But it’s not clear whether the eucalypts simply evolved to weather fire, or whether they actually promote fires. Bowman says the burn-your-neighbors theory, inspired by a 1970 paper by American forester Robert W. Mutch, suggests intent: By this reading, the eucalypts’ oil-rich leaves evolved to ignite easily; their peeling bark evolved to be carried aloft by the wind off a fire, spreading the blaze; they evolved to resprout quickly after a fire from both seed and shoot not just because they evolved in a landscape that burns frequently, but because, in some flori-sadomasochistic way, they want to be burnt. As intriguing as the theory is, Bowman thinks it goes too far, failing the Occam’s-razor test: It’s simpler to imagine that eucalyptus evolved with oily leaves because those oils deter insects and koalas; they evolved peeling bark because the falling bark takes parasitic epiphytes with it; and the trees quickly resprout en masse after fire because they’ve evolved to tolerate fire, not to enjoy it. Like the other Australian fire ecologists and eucalyptus experts I spoke with, though, Bowman called the genus in general, and blue gum in particular, extremely flammable. “They’re absolutely dangerous plants,” he says. It’s not personal. “I love eucalyptus,” Bowman says. “The forests are beautiful. You get away from stress, smell the smells, see the birds. But then they catch on fire.”

plan, Signpost 29 is a good example of what will happen when eucalyptus is removed; to their opponents, it is a prime example of the folly in removing the trees. As we walk the downhill side of the road, Maloney points out what he sees as potential hazards: dry wood chips, brush that should be cleared out, a thistle-covered hillside, more sun, more wind. “This in here is a disaster waiting to happen,” he concludes. I visited Signpost 29 three times while reporting this story. Although the view didn’t change, I saw something different each time through the eyes of the person I was with. Here, the debate about the flammability or fire danger of an entire forest is reduced to its smallest, most arcane variables, starting with leaf

David Sarber

grant to UC Berkeley, the City of Oakland, and the East Bay Regional Park District—the major land managers in the hills area—to thin and remove trees and brush on 1,000 acres of ridgeline between Wildcat Canyon and Anthony Chabot regional parks; the park district will thin another 1,000 acres. Of those 2,000 acres, roughly 800 are dominated by blue gum—representing perhaps a quarter of the East Bay’s eucalyptus. The Hills Conservation Network, a small Berkeley nonprofit whose members live in the area covered by the FEMA grant, promptly sued FEMA to stop the grant, focusing in particular on roughly 350 acres of Oakland and UC Berkeley property in Claremont Canyon and Strawberry Canyon and around the Caldecott Tunnel, where all nonnative trees—predominately eucalyptus— would be removed. It argued that clearing trees would actually make the hills more flammable.

Long-time resident, photographer David Sarber, drove all around the Oakland/ Berkeley hills on October 20, 1991, documenting the Tunnel Fire. This shot was taken from the area around Grizzly Peak. Note the eucalyptus on the ridge.

chemistry. The Vicks VapoRub smell of blue gum forests comes from the oils in their foliage, oils that fire ecologist consultant Carol Rice says can be as much as a fifth of a eucalyptus leaf ’s dry weight. Oil has a higher energy density and lower ignition point than cellulose (the stuff plant cell walls and Mini Wheats are made of), and in a hot fire, these oils can boil out of the leaf and then ignite, which is why blue gums have a reputation for exploding. Euc-defenders point out that the leaves of native California bay laurel trees also have a high oil content. Yet Rice, who helped plan UC Berkeley’s portion of the FEMA application, says that factor is mitigated by the higher moisture content of bay laurel leaves. From unclear comparisons of leaf chemistry, we are led down progressively less rewarding or elucidating scientific rabbit holes. The high oil content of eucalyptus leaves also means that they burn hotter than less oily leaves. After an extensive search, I came up with four studies that concluded blue gum leaves have a heating value of about 10,000 Btu per pound, which is a little less than coal and about 1,500 Btu more than your average plant material. But again, this is not necessarily more than native species—for example, coyote brush, an early-succession bush that could replace eucs in unshaded areas, has a heating value of about 8–10,000 Btu per pound, depending on the time of year. october–december 2016

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report by Amphion Inc. on the proceedings of a meeting by the Vegetation Management Consortium (which later became the Hills Emergency Forum), a group of local fire management stakeholders and experts. Rice was a participant at the 1995 meeting. I asked her why the consortium gave blue gum a high ignitability rating as well as a high hazard rating—what studies was that based on? It wasn’t based on any specific studies, she told me, but was rather an agreement among the experts—as she recalled it, a sort of, “This is what we think. What do you think?’”

The aftermath of the Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills, fall 1991. [Oakland Fire #12-91.]

(For context, a single kitchen match is worth about one Btu.) Ignitability—how easily something catches fire—is a combined result of its architecture, chemistry, moisture content, and caloric values. Like dry grass, blue gum leaves have a high surface-area-to-volume ratio and tend to build up in well-aerated piles. But, as with the Btu comparisons, there are few applicable apples-to-apples (or blue-gums-to-bay-laurels) studies of ignitability in the Bay Area. Jack Gescheidt, a fervent eucdefender and photographer who makes pictures of nudes posing with trees, told me that he conducted an informal test, lighting both wet and dry leaves from blue gum and bay laurel trees over his stovetop. At his urging, I did the same. The wet leaves didn’t burn, but the dry leaves of both species flared impressively and smoked up my apartment. But there is no peer-reviewed version of my informal test. According to both the FEMA environmental impact statement and a 2016 study of blue gums in California by ecologist Kristina M. Wolf and biologist Joseph M. DiTomaso, blue gum has an ignition rating of 1 out of 10, with one being the most easily ignited. Grass also earns a 1, while oak/bay woodland earns a 6 and scrub vegetation earns a 4 to 8. To find out where that rating came from, I followed a twisted path from document to document, each taking me a little further back in time. Both the FEMA impact statement and Wolf and DiTomaso’s study list the source of the ignitability rating as a 2009 wildfire hazard reduction and vegetation management report by California-based environmental consultants LSA Associates, prepared for the East Bay Regional Park District. LSA Associates’ source, in turn, is a 1995 b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

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About a month after my visit to Signpost 29 with Dave Maloney, I return with Dan Grassetti, founder and director of the Hills Conservation Network, the nonprofit that’s filing suit against FEMA. A tech entrepreneur, Grassetti lives in the hills near Claremont Canyon. Like Maloney, he says he got involved after researching the FEMA plan and coming to the conclusion that removing trees would make the area more fire prone, not less. We walk uphill along Claremont Avenue, then hike up into the eucalyptus grove. This is one of the areas owned by UC Berkeley, where all of the eucalypts would be removed. The gums tower over us. Underneath are small oaks, bays, and smaller shrubby native species. Though it was sunny and beginning to get warm on the downhill side of the road, here it is cool. The ground is muddy. When the wind stirs the boughs, drops of last night’s fog rain down on us. Near the crest of the hill, we come upon a large blue gum with seven boles. “This is my favorite tree,” Grassetti says, giving it a slap on the trunk. “This one I made a promise to, that I was not going to let any harm come to it. I’m going to live up to that promise.” The ground around the tree is littered with its bark and leaves, inches deep in places. If there is a single factor that makes the blue gums a fire hazard, it is this. Andrew Sullivan, a bushfire expert at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra, says that in Australia, dry eucalypt forest might accumulate eight to 12 tons of debris per acre. Like the other Australians I spoke with, Sullivan called the Bay Area blue gums “supersized,” treated to better soils than those in nutrient-poor Australia and untrimmed by their native pests. Its native decomposers are (continued on page 44) missing too, meaning fallen leaves and bark

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Courtesy of Elizabeth Hadly

tion? eh: Here’s the important thing about an Interview by Mary Ellen Hannibal ecosystem: The species that are able to live in a given place are always changing Stanford University paleoecologist Elizabeth Hadly has spent her career looking into the deep past—how and will continue to change. The wolves, elk, and other species survived the massive climate change of the Pleistocene—but now she’s asking the important thing is that we protect the same questions about our future. Warning that present-day human impacts are causing unprecedented processes, that we allow species interacchanges to the environment, in her recent book Tipping Point for Planet Earth: How Close Are tions to adapt as much as they can. But We to the Edge? Hadly says our ecological support systems are damaged nearly beyond repair. As the what we do where depends on our values new faculty director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Ecological Reserve, she’ll guide research that uses local for that place. One approach might be to ecosystems to try and answer those global questions. Hadly also steps well beyond the ivory tower, helping think of what we want to conserve. For California Governor Jerry Brown spread the word that to safeguard our quality of life, we must act now. example, in what we call wilderness, it By phone from Mongolia and parts of Africa and in person from her Stanford office, Hadly talked with me would mean that we don’t interfere—we don’t bring in machines or cut roads. In about tipping points, how local is where it’s at, and the diversity of Bay Area plants and people. parks, we might conserve mary ellen hannibal: Today the iconic species people you’re known for your climate care about, and we may change research, but you have an have to manage those. On undergraduate degree in anthropolForest Service and Bureau ogy and studied wildlife in Yellowof Land Management stone National Park. How did you land, it’s all about the get from there to here? resources, like logging, for elizabeth hadly: All along I’ve example, or grazing been interested in understanding opportunities, or clean how modern ecosystems came to be. water. You can think about You can study this question by various kinds of protected looking at earlier versions of our landscapes fulfilling a ecosystems, which means reconportfolio of biodiversity structing the past. In Yellowstone I ideals, and that should was looking at how the species that include zoos, which may survived deglaciation and the be the last reservoir for Pleistocene extinction event around some species we still want 11,700 years ago handled the climates to maintain. meh: In your recent book of the last several thousand years. Tipping Point for Planet Earth: Twelve thousand years ago, YellowHow Close Are We to the Edge?, stone was covered with ice. How did co-authored with your the wolves, elk, and vegetation we husband, Anthony find there come together? Where did Barnosky, you point to five they come from? I was interested in major stressors on our ancient DNA but was working on fairly recent fossils. No one had life-support systems: thought about these animals—peoclimate disruption, mass Elizabeth Hadly holds a bird during field research with students in Las Cruces Reserve, ple were always going back to extinction, loss of whole Costa Rica, March 2011. dinosaurs. ecosystems, pollution, and I began to realize that the landscapes was a big wake-up call. I set myself the human population growth (with attenand cadence of life in Yellowstone were task of going places around the world to dant consumption patterns). Can you changing in front of my eyes. With a see what was happening elsewhere—the explain exactly what a “tipping point” is? eh: In a linear system, if you push “x” Arctic, the Himalayas, Kilimanjaro. I graduate student, I did a study of amount in one direction you’ll get a “y” asked local people what they were seeing. amphibians from 49 ponds and found response every time. But nature is a One thing I realized, and this was very that in a very short period of time many nonlinear system. You can keep adding hard for me to accept, is that there are no of the ponds had dried up entirely. This b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

person

Elizabeth Hadly Turns to the Future

Courtesy of Elizabeth Hadly

intact, untouched places left.

meh: What does that mean for conserva-

f irst

“xs” but that won’t necessarily equal a predictable amount of “y”. That sounds pretty abstract, but the classic example is an egg rolling off a counter. Once the egg hits the ground, it can never be returned to its prior state. meh: Any local environmental examples? eh: Yes, the massive forest mortality we’re seeing in California right now. At least 70 million trees are dead or dying, due to many factors, including humanexacerbated drought. It’s probable that given climate change, these forests will not recruit. Trees require a certain amount of water to get established, and we don’t have the necessary moisture. So we’ve hit a tipping point—massive change that won’t change back. It’s likely those forests will be replaced with scrubland. meh: How do tipping points impact extinction? eh: There’s a synergistic element in tipping points: Losing all that forest, we’ve lost habitat structure for additional species. Trees and coral reefs, for example, provide that much more area for things to exist in, which is one reason you have so much diversity in those systems. We are flattening out diversity. It’s not just that we’re losing numbers of species across the board. We’re losing the top carnivores at the fastest rate. We’re losing the big, rare things on land and in the water. When we lose the big ones we lose their interactions with species lower down on the food chain, which causes more extinctions. We’re going backwards along the evolution of life, eliminating the more complex animals and ending up with weedy species, generalists, slime. meh: But the good news is that the dire information has reached the ear of Governor Jerry Brown? eh: Yes. In 2012 I was a co-author with a group of scientists, including my husband, on a paper in Nature entitled “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere.” Brown phoned Tony and asked him why weren’t we scientists shouting this information from the rooftops? We thought we were! He had us translate the scientific article into a policy paper with a one-page summary, very clean, simple, and direct. It’s called

first person

“Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century.” Hundreds of scientists from all over the world have endorsed it. meh: You’re becoming faculty director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Ecological Reserve and your husband has recently become executive director there. As you’re a global ecologist, it’s a bit surprising you would take the helm at Jasper Ridge, which is an emphatically local place. eh: In my opinion, the most important scale for us to focus on is the local scale. We talk about global change, and presidents and prime ministers discuss that. The processes by which those machines work is very slow. But the actual impact of climate change is personal and local. I’m super interested in the local-to-regional scale of change. This is where we can really dig in to what’s happening. Jasper Ridge is the site of several nationally important, longterm climate change studies, and I’m eager to learn more about them. The idea of coevolution—that certain species’ evolutionary fates are sculpted by other species—came out of science conducted on butterflies and their host plants at Jasper Ridge. More recently, global warming experiments showed that increased CO2 has impacts on grassland production and also may influence the timing of flowering in plants. Our plans for Jasper Ridge are not

Elizabeth Hadly with her husband, Anthony Barnosky, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, during a trip to the Flaming Cliffs in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert in the summer of 2016.

officially laid yet, but we’re looking forward to really grounding our research in a local place. It’s a great challenge to ask ourselves, “Okay, if we want to protect, to defend, to apply our knowledge to this place, Jasper Ridge, what will we do?” Global change is in motion and there is no going back, no “restoration” to some historic state. I want to anticipate the future. How do we anticipate the future of the nature reserve in this place? It’s exciting. meh: How does nature in the Bay Area impact your daily life? eh: We go out every weekend into the coastal hills. It’s not just for the views. There’s so much diversity here. You start in an urban area and then you are in oak grassland, then into redwood forests. I have some regular hiking spots on this side of the Bay—Arastradero, Windy Hill, Skyline. We also have a favorite in the East Bay—the Sunol Regional Wilderness. It’s a gem. In the spring, poppies are all over the grassland and there’s always water flowing there at Little Yosemite. The diversity of the landscape here is synergistic with the diversity of people. We recharge with nature here, and appreciating it stimulates a lot of what we do.

october–december 2016

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(continued from page 31) and outdoorspeople, are cross-correlated with scat DNA analysis. With this two-dimensional method, Black

found a high density of otters in Humboldt Bay, somewhere between 41 and 44 in a study area stretching along 28 miles of coastal habitat. Importantly, the genetic data suggested that the otter-spotter data alone undercounted this population considerably. “What we learned is that citizen scientists are seeing about 50 percent of what’s really out there,” he says; the information is really just a pointer to where otters are, not a full census. ROEP doesn’t yet have the resources to execute such a study, but it has pulled together results from its citizen science and trained volunteer projects in a paper published last year in Northwestern Naturalist. The upshot: Otters have been spotted in every county of the Bay Area except San Mateo. The ROEP study area of Marin County hosts approximately 50 otters total, with a minimum of 0.21 otters per 0.6 miles along the coast from Rodeo Lagoon north and a higher density in Tomales Bay alone, at around 0.32 otters per 0.6 miles. (There was less data on inland regions along creeks and in reservoirs, so population density was not calculated for those areas.) These densities are minimum figures. They’re lower than Black’s and could reflect a rebounding population, or they could be an underestimate. More data will come from a genetics study now under way; Jordan Arce, a graduate student at the Genomics/Transcriptomics Analysis Core at San Francisco State University, is using scat samples to measure the genetic diversity of North Bay

otters. The analysis will estimate the male/female ratio and will read mitochondrial DNA, tiny loops of genetic material passed from mothers to offspring that can be used to estimate the relatedness between individuals. Roughly speaking, more diversity and less relatedness indicates a healthier population. “It can tell us a great deal about the status of the species and how it’s functioning, and also the status of the ecosystem,” says Arce. By comparing samples from four sites in the North Bay, he also intends to figure out how groups are related—and by implication, how otters have spread. Samples from Sutro Sam, for example, could confirm whether he arrived in San Francisco from the Marin Headlands, as Isadore suspects, or from the Sacramento River Delta. It seems likely that East Bay otters came from the Delta, but determining that for sure is a project for the future. Meanwhile, Isadore is making sure the data she and her crew have collected gets on the desk of anybody who might need it for management decisions. Knowing where otters are is important for many reasons—for example, protecting endangered species that can be otter food, like coho salmon or the chicks of Ridgway’s rails. The data is also needed to prepare for oil spills, says Michael Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at UC Davis, which coordinates the responses of dozens of organizations statewide. With a considerable increase in the amount of oil being shipped (continued on page 42) via train into Martinez and other sites near the

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(continued from page 40) Bay, a spill becomes more likely—but without accurate maps of otter populations, a rescue response might be inadequate. Otters are highly sensitive to spills: Not only does oil kill off otter prey, an otter with oiled and matted fur will soon be too cold to hunt. “Knowing that otters are in the general vicinity is of value, but the more fine-grained data that we can have, that can help us know where priority areas are should a spill occur,” Ziccardi says. After the Cosco Busan oil spill in 2007, otters were seen feeding on oiled pelicans. But with no census from before the spill, it’s impossible to know whether their population in the Bay Area took a hit—or how bad it might have been.

Otters are usually their own hype men—they need no support. But this is a tough crowd here at the Star Academy, a high school for students with learning differences in San Rafael. These ninth and tenth graders and their teachers have been monitoring a nearby site all year. Isadore is coming to thank them in person. She cues up a video—a series of camera-trap clips of otters playing, snuffling at the camera, and generally being irresistible. It’s followed by a beautiful animation. But she gets only a few laughs. It’s June, and these kids just want the school year to be over. We all go out to the site, at Las Gallinas Valley Sanitary District reclamation ponds, to look for otters and their evidence. As they walk the dirt roads, the students brighten up. One of them, a student, tells me he’s become expert at otter detection:

“I can walk right up to it and know it’s scat.” Others goof around, imitating the death throes of the grebe they saw get killed by an otter earlier in the year. This spring will be ROEP’s five-year anniversary. In 2014, Isadore was awarded the Environmental Leader of Marin gold medal; the group won a conservation award from the John Muir Association. But documenting otters in the Bay Area is only phase one. There are now more new questions to answer. There are hints that river otters on the coasts have distinctive patterns, habitat needs, and diets. Researchers want to learn more about that. Will they keep spreading southward? Last year brought one unconfirmed sighting in the Santa Cruz Mountains and one in Los Gatos, around Vasona Lake. Historically, otters were found all the way down to San Louis Obispo. Isadore sees otters as a way in to understanding relationships between other things—how otter prey like the endangered coho rise and fall, whether local improvements in water quality outweigh the new pressures of climate change for otters. As an animal that relies on land and water, fish and fowl, it’s a species that can tie a lot together. She’s plotting to do a study to link pollutant loads around the Bay with otter reproductive success, reading river otters like a sentinel for water quality. “River otters are an enormous treasure chest of information,” she says. “I’m impatient to have the staff and the money to do all these studies and drill down into it.” Because it’s not enough to celebrate that otters are back, she

says. “Too often people in conservation, people like us who live in this beautiful area, we can get a little bit insular and pleased with ourselves. We can look around and say, ‘We live in paradise and we’re fixing it!’ We have to do more.” She’s counting on the otters to do it. And they work in mysterious ways. As we walk along the berms with the Star Academy students, one girl sidles up alongside Isadore with a question. Earlier, she looked bored. But now she wants to know: Could she get a copy of that video, the one with the gorgeous animation? She wants to be an artist, the student says, and someday make videos like that one. That’s how it works, Isadore says later: Efforts have ripples and consequences that you never anticipate. By showing a high-school student a video, you might awaken an interest in art and environment. By cleaning up a watershed, you just might find yourself surrounded by otters. “I want people to understand we have the ability to work for positive effects, as well as [have] the negative effects,” she says. “I want people to believe we have the ability to change things. That’s what I’m constantly trying to get across.” Kat McGowan is a journalist and editor based in Berkeley and New

York City. To see the otters—and the ROEP—in action, watch our Bay Nature on the Air video “River Otters Return” on Baynature. org/video/river-otters-return

Photo: Jerry Ting

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decay slower than usual; here, eucalyptus groves can accumulate 30 tons of debris or more per acre. According to a 2006 National Park Service study, that’s compared to California bay laurel trees, which average 18 tons per acre, and coast live oaks, which average just 11; an acre of grass, meanwhile, contains somewhere between one and four tons of plant material. Furthermore, the majority of the blue gum litter is small sticks, bark, and leaves, collectively known as “fine fuels.” These fine fuels are the source of a forest fire’s power, Sullivan says, easily ignited and quickly consumed. “Eucalyptus is flammable,” says Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley fire ecologist. “But the thing that’s most concerning is the volume of material it can produce.” But now, standing by Grassetti’s favorite tree, even this most damning of blue gum statistics seems woefully abstract. “Yes, there is some fuel here,” Grassetti says, then gestures to the head-high brush that surrounds us. “But there’s a lot of fuel there, too. If you cut down these trees and eliminate this source of fuel, well, what’s going to happen? That stuff ”—the brush— “is going to expand here. So did you really get a net fuel reduction? I would argue that at best—at best—you broke even.” With inexpert eyes, I look at the brush and trees and debris, and try to imagine how it all might burn. To really know with scientific certainty, you’d have to compare fuel moisture content, wind speed, leaf chemistry, caloric content, and ignitability. We walk back down the hill, sliding in the mud. (continued from page 36)

In the middle of june, I attended a protest outside the Sierra Club’s national headquarters in downtown Oakland. The 20-odd protesters—mostly white, mostly gray-haired—marched in a circle, holding up hand-lettered signs and photographs of butterflies and trees. “Two, four, six, eight,” they shouted. “Save the eucs because they’re great!” Broadly, the protest was about the Sierra Club’s perceived hypocrisy; the environmentalist organization is also suing FEMA as a sort of countersuit to the Hills Conservation Network’s pro-euc suit. The Sierra Club suit argues that the plan should remove more nonnative trees, that leaving eucalyptus and Monterey pine standing would mean prohibitively expensive maintenance, and that removing the trees would allow native species to flourish. It was immediately clear that the debate over the blue gum’s flammability is only one of several parallel conversations around the tree; while that is the Hills Conservation Network’s primary focus, it was not necessarily what most interested the individual protesters or their opponents. Several of the people I spoke with were worried about the use of herbicide as a way to keep the eucalyptus from resprouting. Overall, the FEMA plan calls for about 2,500 gallons of glyphosate herbicide (a possible carcinogen), or approximately 2.5 gallons per acre, to be applied to stumps. Others were concerned that the FEMA plan was cover for native species restoration advocates. Still others argued that removing any trees would be irresponsible in an age of climate change, and that native trees would not be able to take up the b ay n at u r e

october–december 2016

Thank you for all you do to protect Bay nature!

slack. Their concerns echoed some of those of the 13,000 people who wrote comments on the first draft of an environmental impact statement FEMA prepared ahead of the grant. On the other side of the debate, the Bay Area’s many native plant advocates have their own long list of complaints, also mostly separate from the debate about the trees’ flammability. They call the eucs bad neighbors. Although blue gums tend not to invade new territory, they are salt-the-earth occupiers: Along with shading out other species, their leaf litter leaches chemicals that suppress growth of native plants, even after the trees are removed. “Those areas are really hard to restore,” says Lech Naumovich, a local restoration ecologist and consultant who has worked extensively in Claremont Canyon. Native plant advocates also argue that the trees are inhospitable to many native animals and generally reduce biodiversity in areas they dominate. Native plants, on the other hand, having evolved here over millennia, are better adapted to local conditions, they say. My third visit to Signpost 29 is with Jerry Kent. A former assistant general manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, Kent is now on the board of directors at the Claremont Canyon Conservancy, which worked with UC Berkeley to convert the downhill side of the road to native vegetation. He has also independently researched the costs of eucalyptus removal and management. Kent and I walk the same path that I took with Grassetti and Maloney. By his reading, everything good about the eucalyptus across the street is matched or exceeded by the native species on this side: The native species are less flammable, use less water, collect fog, block wind, and provide more valuable habitat. Perhaps as important, Kent says, this side is cheaper. Leaving the eucalyptus as-is endangers thousands of homes and people and isn’t a viable option, he says. And in the bigger picture, simply thinning the trees, as the park district is doing on their properties, isn’t a great solution either. It would preserve a virtual monoculture and would require continual management that he believes could cost the East Bay Regional Park District alone hundreds of millions of dollars over the lifetime of the trees—and that’s if there are no fires to help the eucs regenerate. By contrast, the trees would only need to be cleared and the stumps treated with herbicide once, he says. It might look bad for a while, but with proper management nonnative grasses and brush would be replaced in a decade or two in most areas by native trees, he says. “Within a very short time, you have a self-sustaining, low-cost native forest.” The protestors I spoke with disagree with Kent: They tended not to believe that the eucalyptus are more flammable or firepromoting than native species, and they seemed determined to discount any evidence suggesting otherwise, arguing, as Maloney has, that whichever of the tree’s characteristics might promote fire are outweighed by its services. They point me repeatedly to both the 1992 Oakland mayor’s task force report and a 2013 report by the U.S. Forest Service’s Adaptive Management Services Enterprise Team. While the forest service report describes the blue (continued on page 46) gums as “highly flammable,” both documents

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advise against removing all of the trees in any area, for exactly the reasons that Maloney cites. Still, both documents say there is a fire hazard. So do all the experts I spoke with, including the ones with no prior knowledge of the FEMA grant. The roughly two dozen Australian and American wildfire experts, eucalyptus experts, and fire ecologists I communicated with while reporting this story (the majority of them with no personal connection to the local debate) were unanimous in their verdict: Blue gum eucalyptus is especially, dangerously flammable. “Anybody who wants to encourage really flammable plants in an urban mix has to do it with their eyes open,” David Bowman told me. There is no single, knockout paper or study that shows that blue gums are drastically more dangerous fire-hazards than other local species, that’s true, but that’s probably too much to ask anyway. Ross Bradstock, a wildfire expert at the University of Wollongong, says that while being able to empirically compare the flammability of different trees would be useful, it’s not currently possible. Leaves or other components, meanwhile, can tell you only so much about the whole, and individual trees only so much about the forest. “We’re in our infancy in understanding how flammability can be practically measured and scaled up,” he says.

(continued from page 44)

Now imagine a fire. Not just any fire, but the fire, the fire that all this is about. It’s late September, in a eucalyptus grove on the ridgeline above the UC Berkeley campus. The grove is one of

ridgeline above UC Berkeley, across the street from the grove in question. I met him that morning at the park district fire station at the edge of Tilden Regional Park, and we’ve driven together into the park, stopping first at this overlook along Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Gallup, who has gray hair and thin-frame glasses, is dressed head-to-toe in navy and wears black leather fire boots. He is persistently neutral: “Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong,” he says at one point. It is true, he says, that—as Maloney argues—a fire would spread through the grass covering the hillside on this side of the road much faster than through the eucalyptus opposite. It might indeed get away, or catch houses on fire. But even under the worst conditions, there is the possibility of containing a grass fire, he says. That’s the idea in thinning the eucalyptus—not to prevent fire, but merely to create the possibility of keeping it from growing out of control even in those rare instances when conditions are at their worst. “We’re

those that were logged off after the 1972 freeze, and the trees grew back just a few feet apart, hung with bark and knee-deep in fallen leaves, bark, and twigs. For most of the year, these trees would collect fog and slow the breeze, and they might indeed make a fire less likely, Scott Stephens says. But not today. The summer fogs have faded, and it’s been unseasonably hot for a week. Relative humidity is in the low teens, and any moisture hidden in the debris below the trees has long wicked away. A strong wind begins blowing over the hills from the east. And then somehow—maybe a spark from a car, maybe a tossed cigarette—the whole dry, airy mess catches fire. Now the flames on the ground are 30 feet high and even higher off the boughs, roaring like a jet engine. At the fire’s edges, trees appear to explode as the volatile oils in their leaves reach their boiling point and vaporize. The heat of the fire forms a convection column, with 60-mile-per-hour winds that rip burning strips of bark from the trees and toss them upward. This is another of blue gums’ talents—its bark makes ideal braziers. Tucked away inside a rolled-up strip of bark, a fire might live for close to an hour and fly 20 miles. Native species and grasses produce sparks and firebrands too, Stephens says, but not of the same quantity and quality as eucalyptus. The shower of firebrands tossed from the ridgeline by the 100-foottall trees foils any attempt to create a firebreak. At this point, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the fire, Brad Gallup says. “Nature’s going to put that out.” We’re on a

trying to change fire behavior,” he says, “to make it easier to put the fire out, to give people more time to evacuate.” We drive along the ridgeline and re-enter the park, and into what looks and feels like a vast eucalyptus forest. Gallup parks his truck and we get out to walk down the fire trail. We pass a man in an excavator stacking eucalyptus logs. The air begins to smell of fresh sawdust. And then from somewhere down in the woods there is the sound of a saw. The East Bay Regional Park District is taking something of a middle approach to fire prevention in the eucalyptus groves it manages, thinning the trees rather than clearing them outright. (This is the approach that Jerry Kent predicts will cost the most, and native plant advocates say will result in a monoculture, though it is acceptable to the Hills Conservation Network.) The goal, Gallup says, is to get to less than 100 trees per acre, down from as many as 1,700 per acre in some areas. After arborists thin the smaller trees, youth crews will clean (continued on page 48)

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remove, which trees to keep. There is an art to it, he says. “If the plan says ‘thin eucalyptus,’ then that’s what I have to do,” he says. “But I can use my professional judgment. There’s no exact number.” When he starts a thinning project, he walks the grove and imagines how it might look without this or that tree, how the canopy would look, how it would look in a decade, in three decades. And he imagines it catching fire. editor’s note: As this article went to press, FEMA rescinded its fire mitigation grants to UC Berkeley and the City of Oakland, covering the 350 most contentious acres. It did not offer an explanation. A UCB press release stated that the fire hazard mitigation work in Strawberry and Claremont canyons “will be delayed for an indefinite period.”

Zach St. George is a freelance reporter based in Oakland. He writes about science and the environment, and feels that as long as we’ve got eucalyptus, we might as well get some koalas, too.

up debris and hanging bark. When the project is finished, he says, only the bigger trees will be left, with a wide gap between the forest floor and its canopy. This “shaded fuel-break,” as he calls it, should help slow down fires. We turn a corner and stop between a feller buncher (which both fells trees and gathers them into bunches) and a chipper. The seven-boled tree is on the uphill side of the trail. From the gully below comes the whine of the saw; then it stops and a young eucalyptus topples over with a drawn-out crash. A man in a hard hat and orange vest emerges from the bushes, then cuts through another tree. The forest between us and him is already mostly thinned. The trees that remain standing are big and widely spaced. Smaller trees lie between, yet to be hauled off or chipped. Bark still hangs from trunks, awaiting the youth crews. It’s still messy, a sculpture only half done. This is Gallup’s favorite part of the job, he says—choosing which trees to (continued from page 47)

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The Bay Nature Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes exploration and stewardship of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Through tax-deductible contributions of $25 or more, the Friends of Bay Nature support this independent voice for local nature and conservation. Listed below are individuals whose donations were received between May 28 and September 5, 2016. All Friends receive advance notice of Bay Nature’s “In the Field” outings. Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle Friends of Bay Nature $2500+ David Frane & Charla Gabert Jorgen Hildebrandt Nancy Kittle Virginia Loeb Milt McClaskey & Audrey Spector

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and receive invitations to additional special events and private outings. Bay Nature Funders are foundations and institutions that have contributed $500 or more over the past 12 months for general support or organizational development. To learn more about how you can support Bay Nature, contact Associate Director Judith Katz at (510)528-8550 x105/judith@baynature. org. You can also donate directly online at baynature.org/donate. Thank you for your continuing interest and support. Holsinger Don Broderson & Judy Weitzner Deborah Brown Lisa Buchberg & Ralph Kaywin Barbara Callison Bob Case Margaret & Robert Davenport Connor Davis John Derdivanis Joanne Drabek & Thor Start Jon & Julie Elam Randall & Tamea Enos Judy Etheridge & Kenneth Snetsinger Jerome & Nancy Falk Robert Fox Helene Frakes Jean H. & Sara Gabriel Keith & Rise Goebel Paul Goldstein & Dena Mossar John & Rosalie Gonzales Patricia Lynn Gotchall Karen Greig Sue Haffner Jon & Liisa Hale Karlene Hall Barbara & Earl Hamlin Caryl Hart Faye & Tom Hendricks Jan Hintermeister Peitsa Hirvonen Bob & Connie Hosemann Philip Johnson Kleyton Jones & Rosalind Kutler James Kirkpatrick Hildegard Kural Watson Laetsch David Larson Linda Lee Lawrence Maxwell Gladys McFarland Kass McMahon Edgar Mendelsohn David Miller Arlee & Dragana Monson Stuart Moock & Arleen Navarret

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ask the naturalist m i c h a e l q: I’ve heard that white-nose syndrome has appeared in some West Coast bats. Are Bay Area bats now threatened? —Ellenor, San Francisco a: This is a very depressing question but a good one. The first evidence of a new and disastrous bat disease showed up in a colony of hibernating little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) in 2006 in upstate New York. A fungus (Pseudogymnoascus destructans), likely introduced from Europe, invades the bat’s skin and causes deep tissue damage. When the bats are hibernating it shows as a white fuzz on the face and wings, hence the name white-nose syndrome or WNS. Bats that hibernate during the winter go into an energy-conserving state of torpor for days or weeks at a time throughout the hibernation, interspersed with periods of rousing. They have a limited amount of fat to take them through this long period of dormancy. But infected animals wake up more often than is normal, become restless, and sometimes even fly out into the cold. Because there are no insects to eat in winter the bats use up all their fat reserves and die. WNS, which thrives in the moist, cool conditions of the hibernacula, spreads rapidly via direct contact from bat to bat. Entire colonies have been wiped out in a single winter and it is estimated that over six million bats have died. As a result, the little brown bat, which was the most numerous bat in the Northeast, is probably going to be declared an endangered species soon. WNS has spread rapidly to 29 states, reaching as far south as Alabama and Georgia, north into five provinces of Canada, and west to Minnesota and Arkansas. And then recently, much to the dismay of nature lovers, a bat with WNS was found in Washington State. After rodents (Rodentia), bats (Chiroptera) are the most biodiverse order of mammals. More than 1,100 species exist throughout the world; they’re absent only in the far polar regions and some remote islands. There are 47

e l l i s species of bats in the United States and Canada, 24 species in California, and at least 12 species in the San Francisco Bay region. About half of the U.S. and Canadian species hibernate; many others migrate during the winter. Unfortunately, it appears that it’s not a question of if WNS will reach the Bay Area but when. Taylor Ellis (no relation), a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service, is working with other bat scientists to identify species most susceptible to WNS and take proactive measures. Of the species found in the Bay Area, two—the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) and the little brown bat—have suffered from WNS back east. Three species of our local bats, also present back east, are known to be carriers of the fungus but are asymptomatic, which means they could act as WNS dispersers. Then there are eight species Courtesy of Ryan von Linden, NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation

m a r k e t p l a c e

A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) infected with white-nose syndrome in New York in October 2008.

that are distributed strictly in the western U.S., so we don’t yet know how they will respond to the fungus. As Ellis has said, bats here “might not even get the fungus in the first place; we don’t know. So the pathogen will get here, but it remains to be seen if it can flourish in local bat roosts and affect bats in our climate. Our big bat aggregations (matriarchal colonies) in California tend to be in spring and summer, and the bats are active and feeding throughout that time.” Additionally, WNS’s climatic requirements for growth—a combination of humidity and temperature—may not exist here. So we, and our local bats, may luck out.

october–december 2016

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es y uidado en un mundo atrapados e, nuestra os a otros dor, usted manda que sted es un ed vive en u relación veedor de familiar, diferente. años y proveedor ar, pero sobre el ador de emas que endientes extraño. UHW, ha ya durante ención de gidos por a Loretta campaña ndado de dico y los dores. En un grupo sido los uecido sus plan para

de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, siempre avanzando acercándonos,

“CUHW está rompiendo todos los mitos al enfocarse en los miembros.” conforme continuamos construyendo el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” Estamos reventando la burbuja cuando nuestro Comité de Constitución sugiere un cambio que combine el espacio de nuestro Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El

a nuestro personal político, y asegure de que se nos haya dañado o se haya los servicios de los individuos que abusado de nosotros mentalmente. viven y respiran la política durante este tiempo critico en la historia del cuidado •Merecemos el derecho de que del hogar a nivel Federal y Estatal. se nos pague bajo el esquema del CUHW, al salir de la burbuja, Seguro Social por una vida de trabajo emerge con nuevas ideas ahora que por un miembro de la familia. estamos en período electoral este agosto. Nuestras elecciones estatales •Merecemos vacaciones pagadas, incluirán dos semanas en las que merecemos el derecho de que se nos puede votar en línea o llamando trate con compasión y respeto por las a un número sin costo, usando su número de celular o un teléfono fijo. Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa de Voluntariado de Incentivos para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros miembros en los negocios al mostrar sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual representa un ganar-ganar para todos. Hemos establecido oficinas en más de 9 de nuestros condados. La mayoría de las oficinas tienen bancos de llamadas y capacidad de difusión de web y cuentan con grandes pantallas. Contamos con otra acción que es también otra burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las actualizaciones por email y mensajes dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros de texto que alertan a los miembros de trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. To End the Age of Waste médicos y oportunidades de educación, Yo personalmente quiero al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. salirme de la burbuja en la que se considera la reforma de IHSS en ¡No solamente lo merecemos, California y sugiero que empecemos con

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